During the 2010 oil spill, emergency responders needed forecasts of where oil would go given different scenarios and weather conditions, not just information of current oil location. Forecasts had to account for this first-time situation of oil coming from a deep water source and thus, “the important processes that contribute to oil movement in deep water, on the continental shelf, and within the complex nearshore environment.” Forecasters used the coupled SWAN (Simulating Waves Nearshore) and ADCIRC (Advanced CIRCulation) models to simulate currents that accounted for tides, rivers, winds, and waves. They adjusted their models with data from Lagrangian particle tracking to simulate “short-term (less than 1 week) oil movement.”

Casey Dietrich is one of 14 researchers besides Dawson who works in the research group. He said having access to Stampede, UT’s new and powerful supercomputer, is important for the simulations the group runs.

“We’re very lucky we get access to one of the largest supercomputers in the world,” Dietrich said. “That opens the door for us to run larger, more interesting problems.”

Dietrich said the models they run use calculations from Stampede that allow them to analyze changes in an area as small as 20 meters.

“We can really see how the flooding is affecting the environment,” Dietrich said.

About the time of Katrina, the computer models “were much coarser and had minimum resolutions of only 100-200 meters,” said Casey Dietrich, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at University of Texas in Austin.

Dietrich has been running compute models at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas to assess the impact of the storm surge on Texas.

Emergency planners in both states take the data generated by the university researchers and incorporate it into geographic information systems.

“They can look down at neighborhood scale and say ‘on this street along the levy we’re going to have water this high,’ and plan accordingly,” Dietrich said.

Comparing the capability today with that at the time of Katrina, Dietrich said: “I think we have a very strong understanding of how hurricane wave storm develop and how they can threaten a coastal environment.”

Also see local coverage by the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.