The meeting brought together a broad cross-section of stakeholders in the international oil spill response community, including field responders, modelers, response planners, and analytical chemists; and spanning government, academia, the petroleum industry, and private consultants. There was also some international participation, with representatives from Norway, France, and Canada in attendance in addition to the U.S. contingent.

The perspectives of people who participate in all different aspects of oil spill response were considered, and there were also lively discussions about the protocols used in different labs to measure physical and chemical properties of oil and oil weathering behavior in the environment.

This workshop was in support of an ongoing effort by ERD to develop software and collect data for a new publicly-available database of oil physio-chemical properties, with the primary goal of providing information that would be useful for the response phase of a spill. This database will be available through a public web application within the next six months, and will include data from Environment and Climate Change Canada, ERD’s ADIOS database, and data from petroleum industry assays, and will be updated whenever ERD collects new data about an oil. It will also be fully integrated with ERD’s WebGNOME oil trajectory and weathering model. 

For further information, contact Dalina.Viveros@noaa.gov.

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