Clarkson professor's program aids in oil spill

POTSDAM — From his office at Clarkson University, Poojitha D. Yapa is helping scientists in Louisiana predict where the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is going to go.

The civil and environmental engineering professor spent about a decade developing a computer model, with the help of a couple of graduate students, to predict the flows of natural gas and oil leaking from deep-water drilling. The program is being used to predict where the pool of crude leaking from the BP deep-water oil rig is headed. The rig exploded April 22 and is releasing about 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in charge of modeling the massive spill.

"My experiments are designed to predict ... how long it will take to get to the surface and where it would come up, and how wide it will be when it gets to the surface and what concentration it will be," Mr. Yapa said. "I'm working with NOAA."

The Comprehensive Deep Water Oil and Gas blowout model makes its predictions based on information about water temperature, sea currents and the amount of salt in the water, among other things.

The model has been used before, but never in an emergency situation. It was used by Norwegian scientists in drilling tests in the North Sea. A simpler model developed by Mr. Yapa has been used by the St. Lawrence Seaway in case of spills.

The model was designed to help create contingency plans before an accident. Because of time constraints — the BP rig leak already is going strong and there is no time for contingencies — the predictions coming out of the program are less accurate.

"This is an emergency situation. We have to do it fast. In this case, we don't have days to run this," Mr. Yapa said. "Because it's an emergency situation, we don't have all the necessary data to make accurate predictions."

Additionally, the program takes a while to run all the information and come out with a result. Someone then needs to be able to interpret the data that come out. That's where Mr. Yapa comes in; he is working with the numbers NOAA sends him to help make the predictions.

"They are using my model and I'm also doing computations here to help," he said. Over the weekend, "NOAA kept calling me, and one time they called me and I wasn't around. My wife had to track me down, because I wasn't carrying a cell phone, by calling friends."

The leak has produced a slick that is roughly the size of Puerto Rico and already is encroaching on fish and wildlife habitats.