UPDATE:
The press release from Goddard Space Flight Center showing sunglints suggesting they are all from the oil slick is wrong. Satellite specialist Dr. Roy Spencer writes in to show me a different MODIS/AQUA image from three days ago that shows clearly where the slick is and is not:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=USA7.2010137.terra.2km
high res 1 km image here
To lend credence to Dr. Spencer’s claim, I searched and found another MODIS/AQUA image that shows a splotch of what looks exactly like what GSFC describes as the “gray-beige colored spill”, except this is all along the west coast of Florida. Clearly it is an optical effect, not an oil spill.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=USA7.2010132.terra.2km.jpg
This suggests then that the GSFC press release has misidentified the optical effect as being the entire Gulf oil spill. The spill is there, as illustrated in the image at top, but it is not the entire “gray-beige colored” area seen in the GSFC press release image. – Anthony
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UPDATE2: Skytruth has a better image which shows the extent, also taken on May 18th, but at much closer zoom level.
Envisat ASAR image, May 18, 2010. Image courtesy CSTARS.
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There is also an overlay showing the sat image with Google Earth, that gives a better idea of scale, after the “Continue reading => ” line.
GSFC Via Eurekalert:
At 3 p.m. EDT on May 18, NASA’s Aqua satellite swept over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from its vantage point in space and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument captured sunglints in a visible image of the spill.
The visible image showed three bright areas of sunglint within the area of the gray-beige colored spill. Sunglint is a mirror-like reflection of the sun off the water’s surface. In calm waters, the rounded image of the sun would be seen in a satellite image. However, the waves in the Gulf blurred the reflection and created an appearance of three bright areas in a line on the ocean’s surface.
According to the May 18 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web update of the Deepwater Horizon incident, “satellite imagery on May 17 indicated that the main bulk of the oil is dozens of miles away from the Loop Current, but that a tendril of light oil has been transported down close to the Loop Current.”
The May 18 NOAA update also noted that “NOAA extended the boundaries of the closed fishing area in the Gulf into the northern portion of the loop current as a precautionary measure to ensure seafood from the Gulf will remain safe for consumers. The closed area is now slightly less than 19 percent of the Gulf of Mexico federal waters.”
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Here is a Google Earth overlay view of the area shown in the photo:
Other image sizes available:
Satellite: Aqua – Pixel size: 1km – Alternate pixel size: 500m | 250m
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Dirk H –
You do not seem too interested in examining the
links I have provided which contradict your
BP propaganda claims–
200 thousand barrels a day is postulated by
on the scene university experts
(one of which
you do not appear to be).
Nor do you provide any links or evidence
in support of your
mistaken view point.
Nor do you seem very interested in discussing
modis pictures which is the topic of this post.
If you need further
assistance try (re)reading my above post.
By the way here is a corrected link to
modis 10 days ago which clearly
shows the oil filaments and sheen attacking
and degrading the yucatan shallows.
No one dares discuss this picture-.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010128/crefl1_143.A2010128165000-2010128165500.500m.jpg
It is highly unlikely that this well is producing 50k to 80k bbls of oil per day.
At the upper end, it would take only 170 wells to totally eliminate all foreign oil imports to the US. If this flow rate is accurate, then we will see a BOOM in deep water drilling.
Its also of note that the largest producing well was just over 76,000 bbls/day. (Daugen field, North Sea). Some wells reputedly were larger, but these were all at the turn of the 19th century, when production was just flowed to the ground, then scooped up.
There were also some issues with stock promoters. Spindletop, for instance, went from 5000 bbls/day, to 100,000.
This well is also producing at over 2000 psi back pressure, 5000 ft down in the water. If it was doing 80k bbls/day to sea bottom, it would do closer to 150k bbls/day at atmospheric pressure.
The estimates of the flow was based on particle velocity measurement. Unless the so-called expert knew the gas/water/oil ratios (and he doesn’t), and the pre and post choke pressures, its impossible to calculate flow rate.
You cannot use particle velocity measurement in a 3 phase flow, with out knowing the ratio of each. Period.
This well is producing less than 10,000 bbls a day. I have seen, up close and personal, 10,000 bbl/day blow outs in Iran. They were much more impressive.
@MikeG
There are limits to what congress and Obama can get away with. Giving up an inch of our 200 mile sovereign waters is one of those things they can’t change. Unlike other things where threat of armed revolt is just rhetoric that really will cause an armed uprising. The big problem is the military and all law enforcement agencies are largely, I might go so far as to say overwhemingly, staffed by patriotic Americans who would join a revolt to defend our borders rather than follow CinC orders to give them up.
Mike Odin:
Mike, i wasn’t to interested in your arguments from the moment you said that sunglint is caused by oil. I looked at some of the pics you linked. I think you mistake vegetation for oil slick. You want me to provide a link for my claims? Well, will the archgreen BBC do:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10134881.stm
Did you think i’m pulling numbers out of the air? Why should i? I have sympathy for fishermen and hotel owners and everybody else in the area who suffer from the oil spill and i want them fully reimbursed by BP. As i stated, BP can pay that.
I just computed some numbers to show that the volume of oil – if we can go by BP’s numbers – is not that gigantic.
At 5000 barrels/day, it would take about 600 days to equal the 3 million barrels from the Ixtoc I platform event in 1979. (3.5 million by other accounts)
Once it reaches full production, the Thunder Hawk platform in Mississippi Canyon Block 734 … deeper water but a similar formation, will pull up to 45,000 bbl/day. So, under comparable conditions, under forced extraction, the best that you can get is about that level. (also a semi-submersible rig)
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=78053
Remember that the BP event is spewing of its own accord, not being forcibly extracted. At a full production rate of 45K barrels per day, you’re still looking at 66 days before you begin to catch up with the Ixtoc I platform’s spill in the Bay of Campeche 31 years ago.
And here is a Google link to some of the travel, resort and fishing opportunities available there now.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=resort+bay+of+campeche&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=ecd40f18f435c7f0
And… in the October 2004 Scientific American, one statement from a sidebar is:
“Biodegradable oil could be distributed across the sea surface in the path of a hurricane to limit evaporation—the source of a storm’s energy”
And while there is much gnashing of teeth about oil.. remember, there are plenty of other countries that would be more than willing to charge you through the eye tooth for that gallon of gas. THEY put their money where it works to benefit them… specifically increasing capacity to sell to us.
Saudi Aramco to Explore in Red Sea’s Deep Waters
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=88275
PetroChina Plans $60B in Overseas Investments
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=93555
In 1983.. I did some time putting around the Persian Gulf. A rig had been hit and the water looked nasty. Brown lumps of oil floating through the water. In 1991, 1996, and 1998… I could see no trace of the environments disasters that had befallen the area. Oh I’m sure you could find evidence of it… if you dug in the right spot on the beach, or took the right sample. But visibly I saw nothing to indicate what had happened. Oil seeps from the bed of the Gulf of Mexico all the time. The critters and creatures there have lived through it, just like they will live through this. Bad event? Yeah, but to me it’s worth the risk as long as I don’t have to pay some miscreant who is in turn financing people who would do us harm.
One question I have yet to see asked anywhere… how many of these damage claims are just people trying to turn a buck since less people can afford to go to the resorts and the beaches since the economy tanked?
Get over it, it’s an Oil spill. Quit the finger pointing, clean it up and get on with life.
@jiminindy
You think tarballs are natural occurences on beaches? I’ve spend a lot of time during my years on US Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf beaches. I’ve seen all kinds of weird crap on them but one notable exception I’ve never seen is a tar ball. Stop making crap up.
@Odin
Looked at the Modis links. I don’t see what you’re talking about. Why isn’t the news media on its way down to Mexico to get us film at 11:00? Also, flow in that direction would seem to be against the direction of loop current flow.
Sometimes it is good to look something in different equivalent units:
A heart pumps about 5 quarts per minute and converting to 42 gallon barrels (bbl) per day is 42.9 bbl/day per person, so the 5000 bbl/day leak is equivalent to what 117 peoples hearts pump per day, that’s more of something I can actually imagine. My mind initially guessed tens of thousands of people.
Hmmm… that number now seems not so big in equivalent units. Now I see why the leak is actually but a sheen on the surface when compared to the area of the Gulf of Mexico.
Of course, convert it to the flow in a hypodermic needle and it would be a humongous number, different units, different numbers.
Still, it’s important of coarse to plug it as soon as possible, my prayers are with the men putting their lives on the line to perform that job.
@Mike Odin
No one dares discuss this picture-.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010128/crefl1_143.A2010128165000-2010128165500.500m.jpg
—————————
Wow, the amazing part of this photo is how the oil slick has jumped over Central America and is now polluting the Pacific Ocean. We are all doomed! [/sarc off]
This spill is indeed a disaster which has been marked by bungling by all the actors involved, but a little perspective would seem to be in order. The oceans of the world have been dealing with oil for far longer than man has been utilizing it and at volumes in excess of whatever this spill is likely to generate, although with the current level of ineptitude being demonstrated that is not gauranteed.
Here’s some links that provide a bit of perspective. The sat photo in the second link is from Feb 09 and is perhaps most relevant to this post
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=20863
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873
http://www.mms.gov/omm/pacific/enviro/seeps2.htm
@Springer
All bets are off after the collapse …
Zeke the Sneak is right, we should be drilling in ANWR. Ten billion barrels minimum, and 5 miles inland where it couldn’t get into the ocean if there was a spill. And ANWR is a total Arctic wasteland, not good for much of anything.
Companies have been forced into ever deeper waters by the government’s putting shallower tracts off limits to drilling. This disaster is every bit as much the fault of the government as BP.
On the bright side, the massive amounts of oil under the deeper continental shelf show that, as always, peak oil is well into the future.
Oops, the photo is from May 08, the posting was in Feb 09
Oops again, that shoud’ve been May 06, Gotta get these bifocals updated.
I’d like to see all the spill downplayers here volunteer to regularly eat seafood from contaminated waters and have their kids go swimming every day on beaches where tarballs are washing up. Bet I’m as likely to see that as I am the north pole free of ice.
This stuff about a million barrels of oil seeping out naturally every year sounds like a bigger WAG than any figures the climate alarmists put out and even if were true it sure isn’t from a point source in a huge stream that causes oil slicks on the surface. The same amount of raw crude seeping out slowly over millions of square kilometers isn’t comparable to a point source.
Dave Springer says:
May 20, 2010 at 3:38 pm
@jiminindy
You think tarballs are natural occurences on beaches? I’ve spend a lot of time during my years on US Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf beaches. I’ve seen all kinds of weird crap on them but one notable exception I’ve never seen is a tar ball. Stop making crap up.
I grew up on Gulf beaches. I’ve seen tarballs all my life.
See Dave’s post above for some much needed perspective. Funny, when it suits them to be worried about how much CO2 natural seeps are putting into the atmosphere, NASA scientists are perfectly willing to downplay the effects of the massive amount of oil that enters the gulf through those natural seeps.
@MikeG
I was a Marine Corps sergeant in my youth. Know lots of enlisted and high ranking officers. They are a force unto themselves. The president and congress are transitory and don’t really call the shots. They can’t even change it enough to allow gays to serve openly which is a far lesser thing than giving up territorial boundaries we’ve enforced for hundreds of years. Obama can’t even call a halt to wars the majority who elected him wanted ended. Some forces in our nation are more powerful and well entrenched than the 500 odd civilians in congress and the white house whose terms of office expire every two to six years. The latter’s command and control over them is marginal and illusory. Police, FBI, CIA, etc. are almost all ex-military and retain the mindset. There’s only so much you can ask them to do before they say no.
The commentary accompanying the image I linked above indicates that the large grey area doesn’t represent the oil, but that the oil is in fact the small dark streaks in the grey field
“The washed-out swath running through the scene is where the Sun is glinting off the ocean’s surface. If the ocean were as smooth as a mirror, a sequence of nearly perfect reflections of the Sun, each with a width between 6-9 kilometers, would appear in that line, along the track of the satellite’s orbit. Because the ocean is never perfectly smooth or calm, however, the Sun’s reflection gets blurred as the light is scattered in all directions by waves. The slicks become visible not because they change the color of the ocean, but because they dampen the surface waves. The smoothing of the waves can make the oil-covered parts of the sunglint area more or less reflective than surrounding waters, depending on the direction from which you view them.”
Steve Huntwork says: (good stuff about oil on water: Franklin smoothed two acres of water with 5 ml of oil.)
You are nearly there. Study the pictures of the leak, observe the behaviour of the clouds, think about what effect reduced wave action will have on the number of CCNs in the air over the oil sheen. Read up about the behaviour of oil-polluted CCNs and how they are more likely to combine and fall out. Every time I look at the pictures of the Gulf I feel like shouting ‘for heaven’s sake, get the monitoring aircraft up there and find out what the spill is doing to the clouds!’
This is a golden opportunity to check the effect of polluting the ocean surface with oil and surfactant.
Smoothed water produces fewer CCNs. Enough oil comes down the world’s sewers to smooth the oceans, all of them, every fortnight. Smooth ocean, fewer CCNs. Fewer CCns, lower cloud albedo, fewer clouds. Fewer clouds, more warming. It’s the Kriegesmarine Effect.
JF
Or not, of course. We don’t have the measurements.
@Springer
Please see Dave’s links from above (I’ve pasted here). NASA talks about the slicks in these pictures being natural. Note: These links show actual oil on the water from natural sources. I still haven’t seen any oil in the ones you were linking to.
Dave’s links, re-pasted for Springer:
Here’s some links that provide a bit of perspective. The sat photo in the second link is from Feb 09 and is perhaps most relevant to this post
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=20863
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873
http://www.mms.gov/omm/pacific/enviro/seeps2.htm
To all US BP employees:
Many of you have asked about assertions made by various commentators on cable television news and comment programs. Here are some responses to the allegations:
BP never had a clean-up plan
The rig explosion occurred on April 20th, and our incident response team was immediately activated. This included the activation of our oil spill response plan (OSRP) that had previously been agreed with the US Government. Two USCG cutters, four helicopters and one rescue plane was deployed. Within a matter of hours we began subsea activation of the BOP.
On April 21st, the administration began holding meetings and regular calls with BP leadership to discuss BP’s response effort, as well as federal oversight and support.
On April 25th, we started work on a relief well and reached out to potentially impacted Gulf States. By this date, we and the Joint Incident Command had:
More than 30 response vessels deployed;
21,340 ft of boom deployed;
500 personnel responding.
We continued to build up our response effort, which currently includes:
more than 20,000 people from government and industry;
over 11,000 volunteers;
over 900 vessels including 46 skimmer vessels;
over 1.8 million ft of boom deployed with;
57 aircraft, 18 fixed wing delivering 216 dispersant flights.
The government has acknowledged our timely response. In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said:
“I will say that British Petroleum leadership … were in Washington very quickly. They were immediately assuming responsibility…They were in the command centers and in the staging areas. They have been working in terms of cleanup and hiring, for example, local fisherman to deploy boom and the rest”
Interior Secretary Salazar said this about the response plan:
“… in terms of a worst-case — …[the plan] anticipated the resources available to cover a 250,000-barrel-per-day spill over a 30-day period, …. So in terms of spill response, there was and is a robust plan that is now being implemented.”
BP doesn’t want to educate the public
The Joint Incident Command (JIC) (BP, the US Coast Guard, Transocean and MMS), as called for in the response plan, has established a joint communications effort to be accessible to media, responsive to information requests and informative to the public.
The JIC issues press releases daily, holds near-daily press conferences, posts all information on the incident website, uses Twitter and Facebook to disseminate information, and employs press officers through the Gulf region to respond to media inquiries;
There have been more than 27 million hits on the UAC website;
BP supplements that effort, with its own press releases, dedicated web pages, twitter feeds, videos, and Facebook page;
We have community support teams in 21 counties across the region: 8 parishes in Louisiana, 8 counties in Florida, 3 counties in Mississippi, and 2 counties in Alabama;
Tony Hayward, Doug Suttles or Bob Dudley has appeared on every major media network, and other BP representatives are available for television, radio and print interviews across the region daily.
BP is not listening to ideas from outside the company on how to tackle the leak and the spill
We have asked the best and brightest from across the industry to join us in this unprecedented challenge. There are over 90 companies working just in the Houston office
Industry: Petrobras, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, Anadarko, Marathon, Hess, ENI & others
Service Providers: Oceaneering, Schlumberger, Cameron, Transocean, Wild Well Control, Boots & Coots, Cudd Well Control, Halliburton, GE
Academia: LSU and U Texas faculty
The Unified Command integrates BP, Transocean, US Coast Guard, Dept. of Interior, NOAA, EPA, DHS, MMS, DOD, US Fish & Wildlife, National Park Service, Dept. of State, USGS, CDC, and OSHA
We are receiving huge numbers of offers of support and help from the public (over 63,000).
Nobody from BP has voiced concern for the people and communities in Louisiana
In Louisiana alone, we have 1,800 people working to minimize the impact of the spill and protect the shoreline. We’ve deployed 450,660 ft boom, 399,790 ft sorbent boom, 426 vessels, and 19 skimmers. Our people are reaching out to local communities to put in place a claims process that is quick and effective so families can make their house payments and put food on the table.
Tony Hayward was in Louisiana on April 28, just days after the leak was discovered. He has been there more than 5 times since this incident began, speaking with those who are on the front lines of the response, meeting with the fishermen and others whose lives have been impacted, meeting with state and local officials to continuously improve our efforts to help affected individuals, and speaking to the people of Louisiana through television and radio interviews.
We have processed $8.3 million claims so far, and are welcoming additional claims every day.
BP has issued a block grant of $25 million to Louisiana along with an $15 million to reinvigorate tourism.
US Employee Communications
@Springer
I know what you’re talking about. That kind of people made up the “greatest generation.” I like using that term even though the guy who popularized it was one of the three reasons I had to quit watching network news twenty years ago.
I still can’t get over how Tom Karl and Hansen don’t believe the people from the greatest generation were capable of reading a thermometer twice a day without having to have NASA revise their readings 60 years later. If the blink comparisons between adjusted and un-adjusted historical temperatures don’t convince people of what a scam CAGW is, I don’t know what will. I guess a mile thick sheet of ice pushing skyscrapers over in Chicago might start to make a few of them start to question it. But, that’s still a few hunderd years off.
Oops, that was Odin not Springer.
@Springer
I agree with you. That is the kind of people who made up “the greatest generation.” I typed a little about this but something happened and it appears to have been lost.
I still can’t get over how Karl and Hansen don’t think dedicated professionals from that greatest generation were able to read a thermometer twice a day without having to have NASA revise their readings 60 years later.
Well there it is. Redundancy. Must be the nuclear professional in me.