The Recent demands of commercial shipping through the Arctic and exploit of natural resources increase the risk of an oil spill in the Arctic Ocean. State-of-the-art modeling techniques are necessary for prevention measures and oil response and determine the fate and effect of oil in the environments. So we developed a numerical simulation model for spilled oil forecasting under ice-covered areas. This simulation model can perform high-resolution computations at low computational cost. Numerical model results of oil spreading over open water, under fully ice-covered water, and under a broken ice field are agreed reasonably well with the previous experimental results. Results of oil spilled behavior under the ice-covered area in the East Siberian Sea have shown the possibility of establishing an accurate and practical forecast system for oil spreading under a marginal ice covers.

The oil diffusion model is coupled with the ice-ocean coupled model (IcePOM model). The ocean forcing and sea ice effect is given as a boundary conditions to the oil diffusion model. The atmospheric forcing component is given by ERA-interim reanalysis 6-hourly dataset. The weathering effect is not considered in the current version. The model domain contains the East Siberian Sea. The horizontal resolution is 2.5 km, and there are 217 × 194 grid points. Vertical diffusion of oil on ice covered area is defined on four stages. The forecast period of oil spill is 10-day to 15-day with 30 ensemble members. Data output frequency is 3-hr.

Yamaguchi laboratory server at the University of Tokyo

08:04 on Mon December 23, 2019