Modeling and Forecasting the 2015 Oleg Naydenov Oil Spill near the Canary Islands

Abstract

In April 14, 2015, the ship 'Oleg Naydenov' sank near the coasts of the Canary Islands with around 1400 tons of oil in its tanks. Currently, this oil is spilled in the sea and presents a real danger of heavy pollution for the Canary Islands. There is an urgent need of tools that allow to forecast the movement of this particular oil spill and asses the way to clean it. The main goal of this work is to apply a model developed previously to simulate the evolution of oil spills to this particular hazard. The concentration of the pollutant is subject to the effects of wind and sea currents and diffusion. This implies that the mathematical model is of the advection-reaction-diffusion type. Here, we briefly recall the considered mathematical model. Then, we solve two particular numerical experiments using this model with data from the Oleg Naydenov hazard. One experiment aims to validate our approach and the other one propose a forecast of this event up to May 9, 2015.