A Lattice Boltzmann Advection Diffusion Model for Ocean Oil Spill Surface Transport Prediction

Abstract

The focus of our study is to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of using Lattice Boltzmann Advection Diffusion Equation (LBM-ADE) to model and simulate ocean oil spill transport at the surface level. We present some preliminary results from a prototype model and simulation in limited scale (a sub area of Gulf of Mexico) with assimilation of real ocean current data from the Unified Wave Interface-Coupled Model (UWIN-CM). We validate our model in a benchmark study against GNOME, a tool developed and used by NOAA for ocean oil spill forecast, under two scenarios: (i) a Gaussian hill concentration using a linear ocean current with the analytical solution as a reference; (ii) a Gaussian hill concentration using real ocean current from (UWIN-CM). Our benchmark results in both cases show the LBM-ADE model solutions are very close to the targeted analytical and GNOME solutions with the same initial oil spill and location.