Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi¹, Dr Sarath  Wijeratne¹

¹The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Maritime accidents (oil, chemical and plastic spills) are rare, but extreme events that require real-time model forecasts to develop a variety of responses over a relatively short period. In many countries of the Indian Ocean, high resolution coastal models including bathymetry data generally does not exist. Over the past 24 months there have been three major maritime accidents in the Indian Ocean: (1) oil spill along the eastern coast of Mauritius (MV Wakashio) that affected local coral reefs and mangrove systems; (2) oil spill along the eastern coast of Sri Lanka (MT New Diamond) that was mainly restricted to deeper water; and, (3) plastic pellets (‘nurdles’) spill along the western coast of Sri Lanka (X-Press Pearl) that severely affected the whole coastline of Sri Lanka and other countries. In all of these accidents the Government representatives contacted The University of Western Australia to provide ocean forecasts to deal with the accidents. This presentation will outline the rapid establishment of the local models for the 3 different accidents and the results from model outputs. In particular, the X-Press Pearl incident released 78,000 tonnes of nurdles that will influence the coastlines of the northern Indian Ocean for many decades into the future.  The transport of nurdles were influenced by the local monsoon currents as well as ocean fronts, a continental shelf wave generated by a tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal and internal wave fields. Development of an ongoing ocean forecast system for Sri Lanka as a result of these accidents will be briefly described.

Biography:

Chari Pattiaratchi is Professor of Coastal Oceanography at The University of Western Australia. He has been at UWA for 34 years. His research encompass coastal ocean physical processes and their influence on climatic, biological, and geological processes in estuaries, the nearshore and the continental shelf region. He uses field measurements, remote sensing, and computer modelling as the tools of his research. He has mentored over 350 people at Honours and postgraduate level. He has supervised more than 70 postgrad students and 20 post-doctoral researchers and have published over 500 articles which include more than 200 in peer-reviewed international journals.