Where Will All the Oil in the Gulf End Up?

By Chris Wilson and Jenny Livengood

July 21, 2010

Scientists could not predict how the chaotic currents in the Gulf would disperse the oil that erupted from the Deepwater Horizon site in April 2010, but they did have a lot of information on how the waters had behaved in years past. These data allowed scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research to create dozens of models of how the oil might disperse.

We wanted to present a sample of these models to readers in a digestible, interesting manner. While the NCAR researchers were generous in sharing their data, there was a major problem of translation: Each scenario consisted of 5 GB of data stored in an academic format called netCDF, which isn't very convenient for a publication that doesn't want its readers to have to wait six hours to load an article.

Fortunately, many obscure programs exist to visualize netCDF data. We were able to load NCAR's data with a program called Ncview, running on an old office computer that has been converted into a Linux machine. This program could output each day's image of the oil model as a PNG file, which was then loaded into Flash.

The preeminent conclusion of the NCAR scientists' work was that no model, no matter how optimistic, showed the oil remaining contained entirely in the Gulf. While the scenarios do not have predictive power, they do show readers the range of possibilities for a disaster whose future no one can accurately foresee.