Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

The images from the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites have at times shown the oil slick in the Gulf very dramatically. Today’s is one of the best I have seen. The sun angle was just right. You can also see a smoke plume at the very bottom. This is where they are burning the oil off the top of the ocean. (That seems very strange to have to write.)

How much is leaking? See my previous post.

June 9, 2010 from NASA Terra satellite. True colour image. Click for higher resolution.

The newsroom tells me quite a lot of oil washed up on Orange Beach, Alabama today…

A link on the CNN website lead me to a couple of must see videos. Both are by vbs.tv. The first is on the most polluted city on Earth. Linfen, China.

You may not know it but about 1% of all air pollution in the United States is estimated to originate in China. It takes a lot of coal to make the electricity to run the factories that make all that stuff you see in Wal Mart and Best Buy and Ikea. The Asian Brown Cloud is HUGE.

The next video is also by VBS. It’s about the great garbage dump in the Pacific Gyre. The gyre is where ocean currents in the Pacific spiral together. It forms because of a semi permanent high pressure area that sits over the North Pacific. The clockwise flow of winds around this high blow across the water and induce the currents. Just like in the air, the moving water gets turned to the right (left) in the Northern (Southern) Hemisphere by the Coriolis affect.

Other gyres exist in the Atlantic as well.

This video is over an hour long, but well worth watching. (Warning for strong language)

Something to think about the next time the person at the supermarket says: “Paper or plastic?”

Dan

There’s been a lot of talk about plumes of oil beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico. I haven’t said anything here or on air about it because  I wasn’t sure who was right. BP says there are not. Several sources in the media say they’ve been told there are.

The evidence now seems pretty conclusive that there are indeed subsurface plumes of oil.

Here is the evidence.

Exhibit One. Measurements of Inorganic carbon and dissolved oxygen made using a device called a CTD.

Exhibit ONE is from Dr. Samantha Joye a scientist from the Univ. of Georgia. She is on board the Research Vessel Walton Smith in the Gulf. Her group is following up on the discovery made by researchers from the Univ. of South Mississippi onboard the PELICAN that deep-water plumes were evident.

Using equipment on board to measure properties of deep ocean water, they have found a plume of oil about 3.5km  wide and 16 km long to the SW of the Deepwater Horizon leak. Other groups have discovered a plume to the NE of the spewing well head.

Using water samples they have confirmed that the water at the depths where the instruments are seeing strong indications of oil is in fact very oily!

Dr. Joye is writing a blog of their observations and it is well worth a read.

Now for Exhibit TWO.

We go to the University of South Florida’s Ocean Circulation Group.

They decided to run a numerical ocean model to test what would happen to oil released at say 1200 meters beneath the surface. Where would it go. Would it stay there, or would it rise. If it stayed deep, what shape would the plume make?

So here’s what they found:

Model forecast of oil released since April 20 at 1200 meters depth. Plumes to the NE and SW of the well are indicated. Ctsy. Ocean Circulation Group U.S.F. Click image for more model data from the OCG.

This model data is in sigma levels, but you can interpret it easily. Blue is deep and red is near the surface. The gray circle is the site of the modeled release which is where the gusher in the Gulf is located. The actual well is about 1600 meters down.

Do you see what I see? A plume SW and another NE at great depth.

I thought so.

Science is about observations and predictions. We have both here. They match up pretty well.

Unless someone can show some decent evidence to the contrary, the assumption that there are deep-water plumes of oil in the Gulf and that they are coming from the broken well head, is on pretty solid scientific ground.

Dan

Areas closed to fishing in the Gulf. S.A.R. images from CSTARS at the Univ. of Florida Miami show oil is now in areas still open.

There are several ways of seeing the extent of the oil slick on the water in the Gulf of Mexico. Visible light is just one way. A better way may very well be to use Synthetic Aperture Radar and look at the Gulf in high frequency radio light.

Image from CSTARS. The red line is the approximate border of the area closed to fishing by Federal Government.

The SAR image to the right is courtesy of CSTARS and the European Space Agency.  It shows the oil well.  It also shows the oil has spread to the east of the federal closed to fishing area.

The closed area will likely have to be expanded further eastward and soon. The current closed area is left of a line southward from Pensacola Bay.

There is an SAR on a Canadian Satellite as well and it too shows the oil quite well.

Something to keep in mind, we humans can only see a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We call it light.

IR, and C band radio waves are light too though and sometimes you can see things much better in that light than the visible light our eyes have evolved to detect.

NOTE Saturday 5 June: NOAA has now expanded the area closed to fishing and the area mentioned in this post is now included.

Some ominous modeling data from the folks at the National Centers For Atmospheric Research (NCAR) today. The used a model to show where ocean currents may take the oil coming up in the Gulf.

It’s important to realize that this is not a forecast of where the oil will be, but a model of where the currents would normally carry it. The NCAR explanation of this is below the video.