Oil spill simulation in the Japan Sea

An assessment system of the marine environment in the Japan Sea is being developed at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency. This study aims to confirm the validity of the assessment system by reproducing the oil spill at the incident of Russian tanker Nakhodka in January 1997. As a main subject, one of the data assimilation techniques, an approximate Kalman filter, was applied to the assessment system by combining an ocean general circulation model with sea level measurements of satellite data. Using calculated ocean currents, simulations of the behaviour of spilled oil were performed with a particle random-walk model. A number of experiments with different parameters and situations showed that the assimilated daily ocean currents with wind drift were for the simulation for movement of spilled oil.