A new buoy for oceanographie and spill response applications

In 1995 the government of the state of Texas through the Texas General Lands Office (TGLO), began a proactive program of current monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico to support its oil spill trajectory modeling efforts. Texas A&M University´s Geochemical and Environmental Research Group (GERG) was contracted to develop and operate a near real time observing system to provide this valuable data. The use of historical currents in spill response models had been shown over the years to be unreliable and unable to account for shifts in local environmental forces. After fourteen years of operation, the Texas Automated Buoy System (TABS) is still providing data to support TGLO´s mandate of oil spill trajectory modeling and response at up to 8 TGLO sponsored locations and 2 industry sponsored locations off the coast of Texas. The TABS system has been used for decision making purposes in over 30 spill events since 1995. Since the inception of TABS a diverse fleet of buoys have been developed with the capability to provide high quality oce?anographie data that supports not only the TGLO mandate of near surface currents, but can also provide meteorological, biological, chemical and directional wave data for research, education, search and rescue (SAR), fisheries etc. In recent years, the increasing high cost of oil has prompted the oil industry to transport heavier grades (specific gravity > 1.024) of oil which when spilled leave little or no surface expression. In 2005, the DBL-152 spill discharged 70,000 barrels of heavy fuel oil into the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico. With no surface expression to guide them, and only near surface current information available, trajectory modeling and cleanup of the spill was difficult, time consuming and very expensive. A TABS II buoy equipped with a Doppler profiler and meteorological sensors was later deployed at the spill site to provide local real time data. A deployment ship equipped with crane, winch and open deck space- was required along with trained technicians to deploy, test and configure the buoy for operation. It was determined then that a small, lightweight, preconfigured buoy which could be deployed by any ship of opportunity at the spill location would be extremely useful and cost effective. In September 2008, GERG was funded to design a small lightweight buoy to provide real time current profiles or near surface currents, meteorological, and directional wave data.