Aveiro Lagoon
The Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil (www.lnec.pt), in collaboration with CESAM (www.cesam.ua.pt), developed a web-based platform to support planning and emergency response of oil spills in surface water systems. The system offers short-term forecasts, using sophisticated numerical models, access to real-time data from field sensors, and a platform for risk analysis. The system is currently applied to the Ria de Aveiro, a major lagoon located in the northern Portuguese coast.
Access to the System: http://ariel.lnec.pt/spres
Operational module
This module includes both a modeling and a data component. The modeling component is based on a 3D baroclinic circulation model (SELFE) and a 2D/3D mode (VOILS)l for the transport and fate of oil spills in surface waters. Circulation in the Aveiro lagoon is simulated through a baroclinic three-dimensional application of the hydrodynamic model SELFE (Zhang and Baptista, 2008). The model spatial resolution varies from 1.5 km in the coastal area and 3 m in the narrow channels inside the lagoon; 7 S levels are used in the vertical. Six open boundaries are considered: 1 oceanic and 5 riverine. The oceanic boundary is forced with elevations, salinity and temperature from a regional circulation model (www.myocean.com). River boundaries are forced with data from SNIRH. Hypothetical oil spill plumes are released daily at selected points and simulated with 2D VOIL (Azevedo et al., 2009)S. VOILS is run in 2D mode, in order to reproduce the evolution of the spill surface thickness. The major relevant processes are all represented by the model (advection, diffusion, dispersion, coastal retention, evaporation, emulsification). All simulations are launched daily and produce 48-hour predictions
The data component provides real-time access to data measured at two remote sensor network nodes (elevations, salinity, temperature). Model-data comparisons are also produced automatically.
Both data from remote sensor network nodes and model predictions are easily accessible through a WebGIS web application. This WebGIS is being developed in Flex and JavaWS, deployed on a Drupal CMS installation. Data and model predictionscan be visualized in graphics and 2D animations, can be compared and validated against each other, and can be exported in CSV format for further processing. Model time series can also be requested in the platform.
Risk assessment module
The risk assessment module includes a database of previously run oil spill simulations, with associated probabilities of the environmental scenarios, and detailed information on the vulnerability. GIS capabilities can be used to combine the information provided to produce different types of risk maps, overlaying oil spill simulation layers with environmental risk vulnerability layers.
Gathering and Parsing sensor data
Data from the wireless network remote sensor nodes are transmitted to LNEC’s central server via GSM/GPRS communications, daily or every 10mins depending on the node.
A set of automated Perl scripts, developed at LNEC, performs data gathering, parsing, analysis and storing into a PostgreSQL persistent storage system. During this process, data analysis consists in guaranteeing that read data is valid against a set of predefined rules, issuing email alerts if data is invalid.
