The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) released their Broad Agency Announcement seeing white papers for several topics related to oil spill response technology. Of particular interest to OSRI are the subject areas of: Ice Month at Ohmsett , Methods to Increase Encounter Rate for Skimming and In Situ Burn Operations , Mechanical Technologies to Facilitate and Improve Oil Spill Containment and Recovery Under Arctic Conditions, and Remote Sensing. There are several other topics included in the BAA as well. BAA E12PS00004
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The OSRI advisory Board will be meeting on February 10th from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm. The agenda and board packet can be found at http://www.pws-osri.org/business/bod/bod_meetings.shtml. Included on the agenda are instructions for connecting to the meeting for people outside of Anchorage. The Prince William Sound Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI) in Cordova, Alaska annually awards graduate fellowships. In 2012, we are soliciting one new proposal for a graduate research fellowship. New fellowships will be made available on a competitive basis to students admitted to or enrolled in a full-time masters or doctoral program at accredited colleges and universities. Fellowships may be funded for up to two years for masters or three years for doctoral level research. Students completing this time period may reapply for additional funding, but their proposal will be evaluated as a new proposal. The current award amount is $25,000 per year that may be used for tuition and research related expenses. There is a 25% match requirement. For more information go to http://www.pws-osri.org/grants/rfp.shtml. The deadline for submitting applications is February 24, 2012. The Prince William Sound Science Center is pleased to announce the appointment of Katrina Hoffman as President and Chief Executive Officer effective Dec. 1, 2011. Hoffman will also serve as the Executive Director for the PWS Oil Spill Recovery Institute. She replaces Nancy Bird who resigned to pursue other interests in Cordova and spend more time with her family. Hoffman earned a Master’s degree in Marine Policy at the University of Washington and most recently worked for Washington Sea Grant on Puget Sound and West Coast shoreline management issues. She is an experienced science teacher and has also worked as a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. For the past two years, Hoffman served as Chairperson of the Sustainable Coastal Communities Action Coordination Team for the West Coast Governors’ Agreement on Ocean Health. She facilitated discussions among representatives with very diverse interests. Their work resulted in a policy action plan for the three states of Washington, Oregon and California to jointly focus on economic development, sustainable aquaculture and fisheries, non-consumptive tourism and recreation, and ports and clean marinas. “I’m excited to be joining the PWSSC and OSRI,” said Hoffman. “I’m interested in the connections between scientific research, ecosystems, and community priorities. A key feature of that is establishing partnerships and securing funding that enables researchers to investigate compelling issues and develop technologies that creatively solve problems and ultimately benefit both ecological sustainability and human enterprises.” “I am looking forward to facilitating the research and education programs at the institutes. The diversity of the education programs alone are impressive and have great value in Cordova and beyond.” Established in Cordova in 1989, the PWS Science Center works to promote a sustainable future for the world’s richest waters. Science Center research programs focus on the oceanography, fisheries and wildlife of Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta. Education programs serve a diverse audience of school-age children to adults in the Prince William Sound region. Hoffman also holds a Bachelors of Arts from Oberlin College with a double major in Biology and Environmental Studies, and she earned teaching credentials from Chapman University. She says coastal environments have generated the most important formative experiences of both her personal and professional life. Hoffman joins the PWSSC staff in mid-November and expects to arrive in Cordova about December 1. One result of the Deepwater Horizon spill was the Wendy Schmidt X-prize competition, which challenged people to come up with a system capable of collecting 2500 gal/minute with at least 70% oil to water. The winners of the challenge have recently been identified (http://www.iprizecleanoceans.org/blog/2011/10/11/and-winners-are). The ability to meet the goals of the challenge are extremely important steps forward in our ability to recover oil. But the challenge was unable to address a very important aspect of any recovery effort and that is the encounter rate. Encounter rate basically is how large an area that can be covered in a given amount of time. Given the speeds boats pull boom and the width of the collecting area the oil would have to be nearly 10 mm thick (~1/2 inch) to be thick enough to require the capabilities of the skimming system that won the challenge. More typical thicknesses are maybe a millimeter or hundredths of an inch thick in the thicker patches of oil. This requires that we now devise a means to encounter more oil in order to meet the capabilities of a skimmer. This can be done in part by using different tactics, such as a gated u-boom, to feed oil from a greater area to a skimmer, or by increasing the advancing speed of the collection system. Typical advancing speeds are around two knots. An increase in advancing speeds will be important for collecting enough oil to meet the capabilities of the skimmers. We look forward to seeing improvements in the collection systems to allow enough oil to be collected to meet the capabilities of the new skimming systems. Congratulations to the competitors in the Wendy Schmidt X-prize competition. Let’s continue to advance our recovery capabilities. With the increasing interest in oil exploration and development in the ice covered seas of the arctic, it has become important to improve our abilities to recover oil in those waters. The first issue will be in the detection and tracking of spilt oil. The standard approach is to fly over the spill region and visually look for the presence of oil on the water. With ice present the oil is likely to be encapsulated in the ice or trapped under it and thus undetectable based on the traditional approaches. This summer OSRI started funding a technology evaluation program aimed at technologies to detect oil from autonomous underwater vehicles that would fly below the ice. The concept being that it may be easier to find the oil from below because the system won’t have to penetrate through snow and a large portion of the ice to reach the oil. The cost of autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated vehicles has now come down to the point where it is economically feasible to use a large number of these assets to map the underside of the ice for oil. The The work is being conducted by investigators at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the Scottish Association of Marine Sciences. They plan to test the ability of acoustic and optical systems to detect oil under ice using a test tank at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, NH. Testing is scheduled for the spring of 2013 and we hope to be able to use the results to guide future detection and tracking efforts.  Schematic of the proposed sampling layout Freshwater input and winds are critical for understanding circulation in the coastal regions. Heavy precipitation along Alaska’s southern coast sets up currents that will affect oil spill recovery in that region. The circulation models need to be able to account not only for the local precipitation, but also river and glacial input. At this point OSRI is interested in knowing how well the local precipitation component is being modeled and how it may affect coastal circulation modeling. OSRI and the Alaska Ocean Observing System are partnering to sponsor research that provides validation of a hydrological model used as input to circulation models. The full RFP can be accessed at http://www.pws-osri.org/grants/rfp.shtml.
Pictured is a balloon-based spill surveillance system being tested near Deadhorse, Alaska. The inset is an infrared picture from the balloon showing a truck, a person, and two puddles of warm water. The warm water was visible below the snow along the edge of the road. The OSRI Advisory Board will be meeting in the Cordova Library meeting room starting at 9:30 am on Thursday September 22. On the agenda will be a review of the OSRI bylaws, a financial report and discussion about keeping administrative costs within budget, an executive session to discuss details regarding interviewing the candidates for the OSRI Executive Director position, a presentation on the surfbird project, and review of the FY12 Work Plan. The agenda and packet can be found under the Business tab on the OSRI website http://www.pws-osri.org/business/bod/bod_meetings.shtml  Balloon system being deployed in Prudhoe Bay A poster describing tests of the balloon-based oil spill surveillance system in Prudhoe Bay by W. Scott Pegau of OSRI and Brian Green with Alaska Clean Seas (ACS) won a best poster award at the 2011 International Oil Spill Conference. The balloon approach was taken to provide the capability to get the spill responder’s eyes five hundred feet in the air without the regulatory hurdles associated with unmanned aircraft. The balloon is rated to 80 knots of wind and can stay aloft approximately ten days before needing additional helium. We used the balloon to carry a visible and infrared camera system to provide day and night observation capabilities. The camera system wirelessly transmits its signal back to the ground and can be received by any number of vessels in the area. The camera is also wirelessly controlled and the user can pan, tilt, and zoom the cameras.
Testing of the system included deployment of the balloon from one of ACS’s spill response boats and from a flatbed truck. The camera allowed us to see paths through floes of sea ice that were not obvious from the boat. One of the tests on land was to poor warm water so it could flow under snow and then observe it from the balloon. It was very easy to see the warm water under the snow using the infrared camera.  Warm water can be seen extending under the cold snow (dark color) in the infrared imagery. We feel this approach adds another capability for oil spill response. It provides the ability to stay aloft for long periods allowing spill responders 24 hour aerial observation capability. It also transmits the information directly to the vessels that need the information to maximize their efficiency. |
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