A New Mixing Diagnostic and Gulf Oil Spill Movement

Abstract

Chaotic advection has served as the paradigm for mixing in fluid flows with simple time dependence. Its skeletal structure is based on analysis of invariant attracting and repelling manifolds in fluid flows. Here we develop a finite-time theory for two-dimensional incompressible fluid flows with arbitrary time dependence and introduce a new mixing diagnostic based on it. Besides stretching events around attracting and repelling manifolds, this allows us to detect hyperbolic mixing zones. We used the new diagnostic to forecast the spatial location and timing of oil washing ashore in Plaquemines Parish and Grand Isle, Louisiana, and Pensacola, Florida, in May 2010 and the flow of oil toward Panama City Beach, Florida, in June 2010.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA533747

Entities

People

  • Igor Mezić
  • P. Hogan
  • S. Loire
  • Vladimir A. Fonoberov

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerial Photographs
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineering
  • Flow
  • Fluid Flow
  • Intervals
  • Oil Spills
  • Orbits
  • Sea Surface Temperature
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Surface Temperature
  • Surface Transportation
  • Time Dependence
  • Time Intervals
  • Trajectories
  • Two Dimensional

Readers

  • Coastal and Marine Engineering/Sediment Transport/Hydraulic Engineering
  • Marine Ecotoxicology
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers