Ocean Forecasting Including its Role in the Montara Oil Spill

 

20 August 2010 Melbourne Branch Lunch and Learn Meeting

Chairman Dave Wilkinson, ExxonMobil

 

Report

 

Flyer

 

Overview

This lunch and learn meeting was presented by Dr Brassington, senior research scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology. Dr Brassington leads ocean forecasting research, and led the team that developed the Ocean Model Analysis and Prediction System (OceanMAPS), within the BLUElink project, that became Australia's first operational ocean forecasting system at the Bureau of Meteorology in 2007. Dr Brassington’s talk briefly covered:

• Ocean mesoscale circulation – some key concepts

• Ocean prediction – observations, models, model-data fusion into OceanMAPS

• Montara Wellhead oil spill, ocean services, their performance and impact.

Dr Brassington invited the audience to provide feedback on their current and future interests in ocean forecasting services, e.g. applications that are impacted by the ocean state, the ocean information that is required to positively impact these applications and the sensitivity to accuracy and timeliness of ocean information.