A new method to locate oil spill orgin with modified Lagrangian model - a case study of PL19-3 oil spill accident

Many studies have been conducted to predict oil slicks' trajectories to deal with oil spills while there are few studies focusing on backtracking oil slicks. Backtracking oil slicks is important and useful for searching possible spill location in oil spill accident and marine accident rescue. But due to the horizontal spreading and advection, it is usually difficult to determine oil spill positions (OSP) that the oil slicks get to sea surface. To solve these problems, we develop a new method to locate OSP. This method contains two main steps. First, detected oil slicks are backtracked with a modified Lagriangian model to get oil slicks' trajectories. In this model, turbulent diffusive velocity is modified to gather oil slicks. Second, intersection points of selected Lagriangian trajectories are calculated and a minimum circle covering all these intersection points is computed to locate OSP. This method is applied to PL19-3 oil spill accident to find the location that oil slicks come to sea surface. It is verified that the model is effective to find oil spill origin.