Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

High-Resolution Remote Sensing, In-Situ Observations, and Modeling of Low-Salinity Lenses in the Presence of Oil Slick

ORCID

0000-0001-6519-1547

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

IEEE Xplore

Publication Date

2-17-2021

Keywords

Lenses, Oils, Computational modeling, Computational fluid dynamics, Satellites, Salinity (geophysical), Synthetic aperture radar, SAR, river runoff, low-salinity lenses, oil slicks

Abstract

River runoff on the Louisiana Coast produces shallow, low-salinity lenses. Due to the presence of a leaking oil platform (Taylor Energy), the fine structure of these lenses is visible in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In this paper, we report results of the comprehensive study including high-resolution remote sensing and in-situ observations of low-salinity lenses on the Louisiana Coast as well as modeling the lens using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. Our results indicate that these transient near-surface lenses create significant horizontal density gradients and spread as gravity currents, influencing the propagation of oil slicks.

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS39084.2020.9323394

First Page

5753

Last Page

5756

Comments

This project was possible due to funding by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment and Office of Naval Research Award N00014-18-1-2835. The raw data have been submitted to the GRIIDC database.

Additional Comments

This paper was presented at the IGARSS 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

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