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Funding Source: Year 5-7 Consortia Grants (RFP-IV)

Project Overview

Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment II (CARTHE II)

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Principal Investigator
Tamay M. Özgökmen
University of Miami
Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
Member Institutions
Brown University, Consiglio Nazionale delle Riceche, Delft University of Technology, Drexel University, Duke University, Florida International University, Florida State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Laboratory at Stennis Space Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Nova Southeastern University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, The City University of New York - College of Staten Island, The University of Texas at Austin, University of California Los Angeles, University of Cambridge, University of Delaware, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of South Florida, University of Victoria, University of Washington, Yale University

Summary:

Overview

In January 2015, Dr. Tamay Özgökmen at the University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, was awarded an RFP-IV grant at $20,249,534 to lead the GoMRI Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment II (CARTHE II), which consisted of 25 collaborative institutions and 99 research team members (including students). CARTHE-II builds on results from RFP-I and continues to advance fundamental understanding and modeling of the diverse physical mechanisms responsible for hydrocarbon transport in the Gulf of Mexico environment. The overall goal of CARTHE is accurate predictive modeling of pollutant transport from ocean-bottom release to landfall on the beach.

 

Outreach

Over its award period (3 years, plus a 12-month no-cost extension), CARTHE-II organized approximately 200 outreach activities or products, including:

  • Bay Drift - We designed and executed a citizen science, drift card study to help the local community better understand how ocean currents transport pollutants in their waters, with the help of 15 environmental non-profits and government agencies, 20 schools, and ~200 individuals who found and reported cards, reaching thousands more through media stories, social media, and lectures, ultimately driving the local discussion regarding pollution transport and inspiring the community to take action.
  • LASER and SPLASH - Documented and shared these massive field campaigns through social media, blog, videos, a documentary, and media articles.
  • Drifting Into the Gulf - A Waterlust + CARTHE video that won the Ocean180 Video Challenge, judged by middle school students.
  • Outside Media - CARTHE was featured in the Dispatches from the Gulf documentary, several Dispatches from the Gulf shorts, Currents from Cuba documentary, and Phillippe Cousteau’s TV show Awesome Planet
  • Meetings - University of Miami hosted 2 CARTHE all-hands meetings per year to collaborate and share our research not only within the consortium, but also with students, advisors, and other interested scientists. CARTHE scientists also presented at numerous conferences, meetings, and schools across the world.

 

Research Highlights

As of January 31, 2019, CARTHE-II research, which entailed around 28 research cruises/expeditions, resulted in 98 peer-reviewed publications, more than 100 scientific presentations and 114 datasets being submitted to the GoMRI Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC), which are/will be available to the public. CARTHE-II engaged 26 Masters and PhD students over its award period. Significant outcomes of CARTHE-II research according to GoMRI Research Themes 1 and 4 are highlighted below.

 

Task One: Directed and Laboratory Experiments

 By far, the greatest accomplishment of CARTHE-II was successful execution of two extremely complicated, highly coordinated ocean experiments - LASER in the winter of 2017 near the Deepwater Horizon site and SPLASH in the spring of 2017 in Louisiana Bight. Both of these expeditions brought together multiple ocean vessels, multiple aircrafts, hundreds of biodegradable surface drifters, thousands of surface plates observed from an aerostat and drones, novel remote sensing techniques such as polarimetric cameras and a high-resolution X-band radar.

 

The superposition of simultaneous data via many types of measurement techniques over the same patch of the ocean was able to achieve order-one level advance over previous understanding of the ocean. Fundamentally, we showed that it is possible to make great progress in our understanding of ocean currents by substantially increasing the data collection effort. Much of these new observation techniques and their results were recently summarized in a short review paper by Özgökmen et al. (2018: Technological advances for ocean surface measurements by CARTHE, Marine Technology Society Journal, 52/6, 71-76). One of the interesting challenges that has emerged out of this effort, that we could not foresee, is the need for machine learning techniques to deal with rapid analysis needs for the big data that we have compiled from both LASER and SPLASH.

 

Task Two: Plume Dynamics

 Our plume group progressed in parallel using numerical techniques, laboratory experiments, and large oil wave tank measurements. It was shown early using numerical modeling that the Earth’s rotation induces an anticyclonic precession in deep ocean plumes, provided that the plume is maintained for more than a day (in the case of the Deepwater Horizon plume, the event lasted for some three months). Laboratory experiments confirmed this result as well as deriving an elegant theory that showed that the plume precession rate is equal to a third of the Earth’s rotation rate. A substantial effort was made to investigate all kinds of plumes, differentiated from the ambient by buoyancy differences generated by different temperature, and gas composition.

 

A paradigm shift in how we look at plumes was introduced by Michel Boufadel’s group in that they considered the possibility that the outflow from the pipe is not a well-mixed state of oil and gas, but with gas occupying a large fraction of the volume, or so-called churn flow. This possibility changes the whole calculation about how much oil has leaked and how effective dispersant would be in churn flows versus well-mixed two-phase flows. A theoretical paper on this subject was followed up by a major experiment at Ohmsett tank, in which the main instruments of droplet size distribution were RSMAS- developed shadowgraphs. The experiment was very successful and the results were well received in GoMOSES meetings, so the Ohmsett experimental work will be expanded in 2019 within the context of CARTHE-III.

 

Task Three: Ocean Modeling

Our main objective, from the onset of CARTHE, has been to advance the accuracy of NRL’s data assimilative modeling. This is because while universities have numerous original numerical schemes and models for various applications, a serious ocean forecasting system requires decades of investment in data assimilation, model development, computers and algorithms, data quality control, and model evaluation in many different projects and experiments. This can only be accomplished by government agencies who invest in and maintain staff for their entire careers for work with such a narrow focus. CARTHE is proud to claim that substantial improvement in NRL’s modeling system was attained, as proven by two NRL global patents for algorithms developed during and for the CARTHE experiments.

 

In addition, CARTHE was instrumental for NASA/JPL to evaluate two of their sensors, namely AirSWOT and DopplerScatt, using LASER and SPLASH data sets.

 

Finally, we have helped European AVISO system, which distributes global sea surface anomaly data to the entire community of global modelers, in that we provided LASER drifter data to improve their post-analysis of AVISO.



PDF Proposal Abstract - CARTHE II


Project Research Update (2017):

An update of the research activities from the GoMRI 2017 Meeting in New Orleans.

Direct link to the Research Update presentation.

Project Research Overview (2015):

An overview of the proposed research activities from the GoMRI 2015 Meeting in Houston.

Direct link to the Research Overview presentation.

http://carthe.org/
This research was made possible by a grant from The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.
www.gulfresearchinitiative.org
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