The primary objectives of this study were twofold. The first was to configure an established public domain particle trajectory model (General NOAA Oceanographic Modeling Environment – GNOME) (NOAA Hazardous Materials Response and Assessment Division – web site) location file representing the oceanographic settings surrounding the Aleutian Chain and use it to numerically explore the threat of disabled ships grounding on or near sensitive environmental habitats.
The products of this phase of the study will be a working model of the region, loaded with approximately three years of realistic potential scenarios, and a large data base archive of greater then 3 million “pseudo ship” trajectories each of 7 days duration. This archive will contain data that can be analyzed in any number of ways for future regional studies. The second objective of this study is based on the realization that in any ongoing numerical research an a priori formulation of the problem is not likely to cover all of the potential questions that will come up during the inquiry. Along with the model and the archive, this study will develop a set of configuration files and numerical analysis algorithms that can be used by the sponsors to completely recreate or extend the archive with any variations in model parameters that they think might be interesting, as will as perform simple kinds of analysis on the “pseudo ship” trajectories yielding graphic representations of grounding sites and Eulerian density measures of beaching.
