Environmental impact on chemical/oil spill in the Persian Gulf

An attack on, or chemical spill near Iraq's oil terminals could have disastrous effects on the economy. The impact from chemical spill is highly dependent upon environmental conditions that can either adversely affect continued operations or hinder the safety of personnel. Operational planners' ability to create legitimate scenarios to train and combat these, situations is the key to continued safe operation of the terminals. To accomplish this, planners must understand the impacts of using climatology versus near real-time data in the evaluation of the scenarios. This study demonstrates great impact of using near real-time environmental conditions, provided by a coupled ocean-atmospheric circulation-chemical model with data assimilation scheme, for operational planners.