Eyes On The Gulf - Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Visualization

Contributors: Rick Luettich, UNC-CH Institute of Marine Sciences; Joannes Westerink, University of Notre Dame, Computational Hydraulics Laboratory; Clint Dawson, The University of Texas at Austin: Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences Visualization by Adam Kubach and Karla Vega, Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Abstract: The northern Gulf of Mexico was threatened by an oil spill from the Deep Water Horizon drilling platform in 2010. While oil was flowing into the gulf, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and their collaborators used the ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) model to help predict the movement of oil along the gulf coast. The simulations were run daily producing a large amount of data that needed to be analyzed. To help the researchers gain insight into their data, we used open-source software that integrates geospatial and graphics toolkits along with TACC's large-scale visualization cluster, Longhorn, to visualize the results. Our main effort was focused on the overlay of the simulated oil movement and high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery, providing unique insight due to the visualization's ability to see the data in its geographic context.