{"id":576655,"date":"2010-05-24T14:56:18","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T18:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenrightnow.com\/?p=12031"},"modified":"2010-05-24T14:56:18","modified_gmt":"2010-05-24T18:56:18","slug":"new-research-could-help-model-gulf-oil-spill-dispersion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/576655","title":{"rendered":"New research could help model Gulf oil spill dispersion"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Green Right Now Reports<\/strong><\/p>\n

The eruption of a volcano in Iceland and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have drawn attention to the concept of how particles flow both in the air and in water. A pair of researchers at Virginia Tech and at \u00c9cole Polytechnique, Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium say that flow, though seemingly random, can be characterized more effectively.<\/p>\n

Shane Ross<\/a> and colleague Francois Lekien reported their findings in the publication Chaos<\/a><\/em>. Their research \u201cwill aid scientists and engineers in understanding and in controlling this type of global-scale phenomena, such as pollution dispersion in the atmosphere and the ocean, and large-scale transport of biological organisms, including airborne plant pathogens and respiratory disease agents,\u201d said Ishwar Puri, head of the Engineering Science and Mechanics department at Virginia Tech.<\/p>\n

The current BP spill, for instance, could be modeled using Ross and Lekien\u2019s findings to provide greater insight into how the particles might be dragged into the Gulf of Mexico\u2019s Loop Current.<\/p>\n

Ross and Lekien said they employed existing scientific principles of Lagrangian coherent structures<\/a>, which reveals the separation of the atmosphere into dynamically distinct regions, to investigate the shapes of geophysical flow patterns. They used the 2002 discovery of the Antarctic hole<\/a> in their work because they viewed it as a \u201cprototype atmospheric event\u201d allowing for their studies on topological divisions on the mixing and transport of atmospheric tracers.<\/p>\n

Reviewing data from the event, they were able to determine that an isolated \u201cblob of air\u201d was slowly rotating over Antarctica. Lagrangian coherent structures, some which repel nearby air and some that attract it, formed inside the vortex. The vortex pinched off, sending the northwestern part of the ozone hole off into the mid latitude range while the southwestern portion returned to its regular position over the South Pole.<\/p>\n

Consequently, they write, when there is more than one vortex flow on a sphere, such as the planet Earth, \u201ccomplicated spatial structures can arise and evolve, such as the polar vortex split.\u201d They were able to model this event, capturing some of its dynamic features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Green Right Now Reports The eruption of a volcano in Iceland and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have drawn attention to the concept of how particles flow both in the air and in water. A pair of researchers at Virginia Tech and at \u00c9cole Polytechnique, Universit\u00e9 Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7031,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7031"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}