Modeling the Agia Zoni II tanker oil spill in Saronic Gulf, Greece

Panagiotis Eleftherios Z Makatounis; Anastasios I Stamou; Nikolaos P Ventikos

doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115275

Modeling the Agia Zoni II tanker oil spill in Saronic Gulf, Greece

Mar Pollut Bull. 2023 Sep;194(Pt B):115275. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115275. Epub 2023 Jul 13.

Authors

Panagiotis Eleftherios Z Makatounis¹, Anastasios I Stamou², Nikolaos P Ventikos³

Affiliations

¹ National Technical University of Athens, School of Civil Engineering, 5 Heroon Polytechniou, Zografou, 157 80 Athens, Greece. Electronic address: panmakat@mail.ntua.gr.
² National Technical University of Athens, School of Civil Engineering, 5 Heroon Polytechniou, Zografou, 157 80 Athens, Greece.
³ National Technical University of Athens, School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, 9 Heroon Polytechniou, Zografou, 157 79 Athens, Greece.

PMID: 37451045
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115275

Abstract

We employed GNOME to simulate the oil spill due to the sinking of the tanker "Agia Zoni ΙΙ" in September 2017 in Saronic Gulf. We performed simulations using various combinations of wind and current input, and values of the GNOME parameters, and compared the simulated oil spill trajectories with coastal pollution and satellite data. The best scenario, i.e., the combination that showed the most satisfactory agreement with field data, uses wind data from one of the closest meteorological stations, calculated currents by a hydrodynamic model and default values of the parameters, except for the windage and the refloat half-life whose proposed values are 3-4 % and 6 h, respectively. Neglecting the effect of the wind in the best scenario worsened the agreement. Mass balance results depicted that approximately 47 % of the total 500 tons of the oil spill ended up on the coastline of Attica peninsula and Salamina Island.

Keywords: GNOME; Oil spill pollution; Real case hindcast; Sea currents; Wind.

MeSH terms

Environmental Monitoring / methods
Greece
Petroleum Pollution* / analysis
Water Pollutants, Chemical* / analysis
Wind

Substances

Water Pollutants, Chemical