Alltop.com

A new way to forecast the spread of oil spills has helped pinpoint where and when oil would wash ashore in the Gulf of Mexico—days in advance.

In the weeks after the Deepwater Horizon accident in April, Igor Mezic of the University of California, Santa Barbara, decided to figure out a better way of predicting how that oil would spread. “We were able to do 3-day predictions pretty accurately.” Mezic passed on his forecasts to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The new approach is based on computations that describe how slicks of oil tend to be stretched into filaments by water movement. He says further refinements of this new methodology could be done in order to predict the spread of many other kinds of contaminants, such as ash spewed out of an erupting volcano, fallout from a nuclear accident, or warm air seeping into a climate-controlled building.

Full story at Futurity.

More research news from top universities.

Photo credit: US Coast Guard