Overview of a natural resource damage assessment model system for coastal and marine environments

A system of coupled numerical models has been developed to supply natural resource damage assessments for spills of oil and hazardous substances in coastal and marine environments in the United States. The system, which operates on a microcomputer, is composed of physical fates, biological effects and economic damages submodels connected through intermediate data files. The system requests specified inputs from the user, and supplies additional detailed information from chemical, biological, and economic databases. Each submodel produces output describing the results of computations with in the submodel, the final output being a damage assessment (in US $) for a specific spill event.