Oil Spill Contingency and Response Modelling in Ice-Covered Waters

Abstract

This paper descibes several updates to SINTEFs Oil Spill Contingency and Response (OSCAR) model, which have significantly improved th emodelling of oil spills in cold and ice-covered waters. In addition to transport of surface oil with ice velocity from an external ice model, OSCAR can now calculate vertical mixing from a combination of velocity shear and stratification, or read diffusivity data from netCDF files. Calculation of the wave field in the vicinity of ice is more realsistic, and OSCAR can also predict the ignitability of suface oil. All of these improvements are of particular importance int the cold regions.