HOME PAGE SUBSCRIPTIONS, Print Editions, Newsletter PRODUCTS READ THE PETROLEUM NEWS ARCHIVE! ADVERTISING INFORMATION EVENTS

Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
August 2014

Vol. 19, No. 34 Week of August 24, 2014

Coast Guard plans oil spill response exercise

The U.S. Coast Guard is going to conduct an Arctic oil spill response exercise, using its icebreaker, Healy, as part of the agency’s Arctic Shield 2014 program. The Healy left the port of Seward in southern Alaska on Aug. 8, heading for the north.

According to a podcast published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the Healy is carrying a team of researchers who are going to test oil spill response techniques on a simulated oil plume formed from an inert die injected into ice-laden waters. The Coast Guard’s Research and Development Center is organizing the mission, which is being supported by NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration. As part of the exercise NOAA will deploy a Puma unmanned aircraft for collecting aerial imagery and data, while a team from Cambridge University will deploy an autonomous underwater vehicle to map the underside of the ice, where oil tends to collect. Scientists from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory will work with NOAA scientists, to investigate sea-ice dynamics. Researchers will test the use of a balloon system developed by Inland-Gulf Maritime LLC for the collection of video and imagery.

In the podcast Zachary Winters-Staszak, a NOAA spatial data specialist, said that a prime mission for NOAA will be to enter data from the exercise into NOAA’s spill response geographic system, called the Environmental Response Management Application, or ERMA. ERMA presents information about the status of an oil spill and about environmental factors in high-resolution graphical format, rather like using Google Maps, Winters-Staszak said. NOAA has developed a version of ERMA that can operate without the need for an Internet connection, for use in remote, isolated regions of the Arctic.

- Alan Bailey






Petroleum News - Phone: 1-907 522-9469 - Fax: 1-907 522-9583
[email protected] --- https://www.petroleumnews.com ---
S U B S C R I B E

Copyright Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA)©1999-2019 All rights reserved. The content of this article and web site may not be copied, replaced, distributed, published, displayed or transferred in any form or by any means except with the prior written permission of Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA). Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law subject to criminal and civil penalties.