Little of BP's oil is rushing straight up from the geyser.
No more than 30% and as little as 20% is heading north on wind blown surface currents. Surface analysis clocks it 24/7.
Instead of riding south winds up to the Louisiana coast, BP's Black Gold moves slowly along in the Gulf, moving generally clockwise at depth below 500 feet. The oil is now part of the Gulf's deep water Loop Current.
In July and August these chemicals are expected to begin to return to the surface. They will enter the Florida Straits and be carried in these surface currents:
Summer will bring statistical risks associated with tropical storms, including hurricanes.
Camille produced maximum 25-foot storm surge.
Pic#1 + Pic#2 = Murphy's Law for summer 2010.
NOAA is tasked with tracking. Turns out they lack the basic equipment, lack training, and are doing nothing to improve. MBTF :::
The map is U.S. government work from late 1990s.
The big risk for summer of 2010 will be storm surges. The model to satisfy Murphy's Law takes us to the 1969 landfall for hurricane Camille.
Central pressure - 27.63
Peripheral pressure - 29.92
Radius to maximum wind - 14 nautical miles
Translation speed (knots) - 13.0 knots
Maximum Gradient Wind - 125 miles per hour.0
These numbers produced measured storm surges at:
Pass Christian MS - 25.4 feet
Biloxi MS --------- 20.4 feet
There wasn't much left of Biloxi.
So now we have NOAA out there in the Gulf not taking samples of the water down in the Loop Current. The excuses earn the No Science Award for the month:
"The business of trying to detect submerged oil is not a settled science," Cmdr. Shepard Smith, the [Thomas Jefferson] ship's commanding officer, said Tuesday.... "There isn't a great body of experience with how to do this because it's a really very unusual circumstance."
The 208-foot, 36-person ship has been equipped with a variety of methods to detect oil. Smith said researchers have some idea how the sensors may react, he but added, "We don't know for sure, because we don't know the form it might take, and we've never done it before."
NOAA can't analyze water ???
-- They don't understand taking samples and analyzing them ?
-- They don't have a lab rat on board ?
-- Not one portable GC-Mattauch-Herzog-MS. Field gas chromatography mass spectrometry instrument -- or equivalent -- in the offshore inventory ???
-- No contact with Prosolia Inc. in Indianapolis ? They make a hand-held MS.
-- NOAA no-talkie with the Cousteau team ? The Cameron Team ?
-- The half-dozen vendors who have sample taking containers off-the-shelf ???
-- They don't know that getting sampling gear down a mile costs $200,000 OTC ?
You guessed, didn't you ???
ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Here's confirmation from a career NOAA "scientist":
Your diary reflects an ignorance of how oceanographic science works...
There is no "oil sensor" on the insruments that NOAA uses. I have never seen spectrometry capability on any NOAA vessel. The most we can do with a water sample is filter out to discrete size samples and then bring them back to an on-shore lab. We do collect conductivity temperature and depth (CTD) profiles through a water column, but the maximum depth on most NOAA vessels I have been on is 1000 meters... To collect samples at depth the vessels need hydraulic and winch capability that I have never seen on a commercial vessel! NOAA vessels usually have no more than 12 Niskin bottles on the rosette for sampling, so your scenario of collecting samples at 100 meter levels to the bottom is at best simplistic. To drop a CTD to 1000 meters and collect samples on the way up takes at least an hour and then to travel to the next site on your proposed 5km grid would take another 1/2 hr- At best, one NOAA/university research vessel can do about 12 CTD casts in a 24 hr period, so your grid would entail dozens of vessels and is simply unrealistic.. This catastrophe is unprecedented and to ridicule the commander for pointing out the limits of a seriously underfunded scientific agency is unwarranted and "Homeristic" on the diarists part.
I've been a NOAA scientist for 20+ years- and we know how to sample water!
That is tharul.
Took some research, but turns out these are the resources, equipment and limitations of the NOAA seagoing fleet. Heaven help them. This is not the way other folks do oceanography.
- I have never seen spectrometry capability on any NOAA vessel.
-- That's the problem. you're outfitted worse than amateurs. $20,000 buys a MS sensor and $80,000 gets a decent desktop model.
- The most we can do with a water sample is filter out to discrete size samples and then bring them back to an on-shore lab.
-- As suggested until proper equipment and suitable lab rats are procured. There's no shortage of lab rats.
- We do collect conductivity temperature and depth (CTD) profiles through a water column, but the maximum depth on most NOAA vessels I have been on is 1000 meters... To collect samples at depth the vessels need hydraulic and winch capability that I have never seen on a commercial vessel!
-- Getting wire down a mile is not rocket science. Getting it down fast will cost you $200,000. Yes, I want to upgrade NOAA and/or BP contracted vessels to professional level equipment.
- NOAA vessels usually have no more than 12 Niskin bottles on the rosette for sampling, so your scenario of collecting samples at 100 meter levels to the bottom is at best simplistic.
-- There's better equipment. Drop the cube system, then have it collect on the way up.
- To drop a CTD to 1000 meters and collect samples on the way up takes at least an hour and then to travel to the next site on your proposed 5km grid would take another 1/2 hr- At best, one NOAA/university research vessel can do about 12 CTD casts in a 24 hr period, so your grid would entail dozens of vessels.
-- Yep. I like that. Hire 24 vessels, invest $350,000 to upgrade equipment, then get arse in gear.
- ...and is simply unrealistic.
-- Obviously, NOAA is not used to getting things done.
Good match.porn for a one-nighter with BP. NOAA's place or BP's yacht ?
The BP oil geyser is not a bureaucratic Budget Island to be colonized.
We need to know where the spew from this oil geyser is going. We need the pollutants analyzed.
We need the information from a minimum of 1800 test points (for increments down to 5,000 feet depth) and expanding this test grid down to the Florida Straits and around to the Atlantic.
Project cost for 2010 will run $50,000,000. (I'd underestimated before; didn't dream how ill equipped NOAA is.) Tech support means hitting up the universities and the National Laboratories.
Project Management ? I'm sure there's hundreds of us who can do that role. von Braun got us to the Moon so there's certainly a way to go out on the Gulf and collect sample water and run mass spectrometry on the samples.
This project ain't rocket science.
What else ? Without the tracking data on the deep water oil, there is no way to prepare for events coming this summer.