Modelling harbour waters for pollutant dispersion risk is considered a fundamental activity in the PROMPT project. The hotspot of this task will be the Genoa Harbor in the West Mediterranean Sea (Liguria, Italy).
Modelling harbour waters for pollutant dispersion risk is considered a fundamental activity in the PROMPT project. The hotspot of this task will be the Genoa Harbor in the West Mediterranean Sea (Liguria, Italy). The wide intended use of the port, along with the heavy traffic, makes the Genoa Harbor a complex environment, therefore the assessment of pollutant dispersion risk there is of the utmost interest. In this framework, this task will allow a thorough characterization of the near-shore dispersion dynamics through the modelling of ocean waves, winds, and littoral currents. The task is organised in two steps:
The first step is aimed at computing the wave and ocean circulation patterns most likely occurring in the area, and leverages data from observations, such as buoys, HF-radar, satellite altimetry, and reanalysis from hindcast. Different clustering techniques for data dimensionality reduction are employed, hence broadening the research that was carried out for the project BE-READY. This results in a reduced number of meteocean scenarios that describe most of the variability of the input data.
These scenarios are next used for modelling Oil Spill and HNS in the pilot site. The numerical employed for the simulations will be Delft3D, an open source, world-leading modelling suite used to investigate hydrodynamics, sediment transport, and water quality for fluvial, estuarine, and coastal environments.
The expected outcome of this task is a subset of environmental forcing and resulting dispersion dynamics within the Genoa Harbor. This dataset is then used as a benchmark for an operational forecast system, capable of predicting in real-time the potential oil and HNS dispersion. This is done by matching the met-ocean forecasts with their closest scenarios, among those previously detected from the analysis of the local climatology. The operational forecast system will be based on the state-of-the-art oil and HNS spill model called TESEO, developed by partner FIHAC. TESEO has been used during major real oil spill incidents, such as the Prestige (Spanish coast, 2002) and the Grande America oil spill (Bay of Biscay, 2002) and has been widely validated with drifting buoys. Moreover, it is currently implemented in operational oil and HNS risk management systems for oil and gas companies.
In conclusion, PROMPT’s sophisticated activities include the modelling of harbour waters for pollutant dispersion risk. Under this activity the team focuses mainly at Genoa Port (Italy) as an intervention area of the project, thanks to the environmental complex of the port due to its busyness, and heavy traffic. To this effect, the task is tailored to the study of characteristic ocean circulation patterns in the study area to detect relevant dispersion modes; and the development of a statistical method based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for real-time forecasting of dispersion paths over short time scales.
Sectors
Risk drivers
Thematic series