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Posts Tagged ‘gulf oil spill’

U.S. government and independent scientists estimate that the most likely flow rate of oil today is between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day. The improved estimate is based on more and better data that is now available and that helps increase the scientific confidence in the accuracy of the estimate.

Super computer predicts Atlantic oily within 6 months.

BP may not know where oil from the Gulf gusher will go next, but Intel does. The Xeon-powered Encanto supercomputer, located at Intel’s Rio Rancho campus, is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. And all of its 3,500 quad-core processors are devoted to tracking the potential paths of the BP disaster.

Encanto started working on the oil disaster just a few days after it began, but progress has been slow-going. The first six simulations alone sucked up over 250,000 hours of computer time using the Parallel Ocean program, a 3-D ocean circulation model design at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The results aren’t encouraging. Once the oil moves past Florida to the Gulf Stream, it could carry oil up to 3,000 miles each month–to the East Coast and beyond.

Researchers working on the project say that the supercomputer can’t provide exact calculations. The physics involved in the interaction between oil and water are impossible for the computer to calculate (researchers are working on that problem as we speak), and dispersants muddy the predictions even further.

From these simulations we can say with a high degree of certainty that it is very likely sometime in the next six months that oil from this spill will get into the Atlantic,” said oceanographer Synte Peacock of the NCAR, who is running the project. “We can say that when it happens, it will be fast, much faster than anything we have seen so far,” she said.