Animations of the oil concentrations and the 3-D structure of the oil plume, numerical results from the far-field modeling of the Deepwater Horizon 2010 oil spill using a Connectivity Modeling System

The dataset contains the *.gif animations of the numerical results from the far-field modeling study of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil concentrations are from the experiments that used the latest updated version of the oil application of the Connectivity Modeling System (CMS) or oil-CMS. The animations show time evolution of layer-averaged oil concentrations for the several layers spanning the entire water column, as follows: 0-1m, 1-20m, 20-400m, 400-1000m, 1000-1200m, and below 1200m. Additional visualization of the 3D structure of the plume could be viewed from the time lapse sequence of the three (3) isosurfaces of oil concentrations of 10, 100, and 1000 ppb, focused over the blowout location, overlaid by the surface oil concentrations above the plume. The oil concentrations shown are daily average values in units of ppb. CMS has a Lagrangian, particle-tracking framework, computing particle evolution and transport in the ocean interior. In this version of the oil-CMS, the specified hydrocarbon pseudo-components are in the same droplet. CMS simulation start date: April 20, 2010, 0000 UTC, and particles were tracked for 167 days. Oil particles release location: 28.736N, 88.365W, depth is 1222m or 300m above the oil well. 3000 particles were released every 2 hours, for 87 days, equivalent to total of 3132000 oil particles released during the simulation. Initial particle sizes were determined at random by the CMS in the range of 1-500 micron. Each particle contained three (3) pseudo-components accounting for the differential oil density as follows: 10% of light oil with the density of 800kg/m^3, 75% of the oil with 840 kg/m^3, and 15% of a heavy oil with 950 kg/m^3 density. The half-life decay rates of oil fractions were 30 days, 40 days, and 180 days, respectively. The surface evaporation half-life was set to 250 hours; horizontal diffusion was set to 10 m^2/s in the present case. Ocean hydrodynamic forcing for the CMS model was used from the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) for the Gulf of Mexico region on a 0.04-deg. horizontal grid and 40 vertical levels from the surface to 5500m. It provided daily average 3-D momentum, temperature and salinity forcing fields to the CMS model. The surface wind drift parameterization used surface winds and wind stressed from the 0.5-degree Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS). The transport and evolution of the oil particles were tracked by the oil-CMS model during the 167 days of the simulation, recording each particle’s horizontal position, depth, diameter, and density into the model output every 2 hours. Model data need to be post-processed to obtain oil concentrations estimates. The post-processing algorithm took into the account the total amount of oil spilled during the 87-day incident as estimated from the reports (730000 tons), and the assumptions about the oil particle size distribution at the time of the release as estimated in the prior studies. The current dataset assumes the oil was not treated with the chemical dispersants, and the modal peak in initial particle distribution is between 50-70 micron. Post-processed oil concentrations were used to create *.gif animations using Matlab software package, v. R2016b and v2017a. Surface or layer-average ocean currents for corresponding days were computed from the same dataset of HYCOM hydrodynamic data used in a CMS experiment. Oil concentration and oil mass data can be found in GRIIDC dataset R4.x267.000:0084 doi:10.7266/N7KD1WDB. Numerical simulations and post-processing were performed using a Pegasus supercomputer at the Center of Computational Science, University of Miami, in 2017.