Supercomputer oil slick sims predict greasy Atlantic

[Dead_Parrot]

This is cheerful...

Deepwater doo-doo

Supercomputers are good for more than just designing nuclear weapons or making doomsday predictions about climate change. They can depress us in other ways, like showing us the extent of the damage that could be done by BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore rig spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation to do climate modeling, has borrowed some computing capacity at the New Mexico Computer Applications Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, loaded up the Parallel Ocean Program (a part of the Community Climate System Model simulation created by NCAR and the US Department of Energy), and dropped some simulated dye in the simulated Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and watched how it disperses over time.

"I've had a lot of people ask me, 'Will the oil reach Florida?'" Synte Peacock, one of the NCAR researchers who did the simulation, said in a report on the early findings released by NCAR. "Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood."



The static image of the simulation (above) illustrates where dye had dispersed – and how densely – 132 days after being released into the upper 65 feet of the ocean, assuming a continuous spilling of dye at the same rate and location as the oil from April 20 through June 20. NCAR researchers warn that the simulated dye in the water has the same viscosity of water, unlike the oil that is actually spreading through the Gulf of Mexico.

NCAR page: http://www2.ucar.edu/news/oil-spill-animations. May have been posted before but the Reg's commentary is new.

[Systematic Chaos]

1. May I suggest a squeegee?

:shrug:

[white cloud]

2. It is an act of God said Rick Perry 5-10

[pscot]

4. God needs to clean up its act

n/t

[phantom power]

3. "They can depress us in other ways"

:rofl: