By now, most of us have heard about the infamous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the woes that BP has had in trying to cap it. The exact total amount of the spillage is actually unknown, but estimates keep climbing.
But have you ever considered exactly how they calculate and track that oil spill? Well, there happens to be some very specialized software that does exactly that… and given the current events we thought it would be good to take a look at this software. There are two types of software that we need to look at — one to estimate the size of the spill at the site, and the other to track that spill over a given period of time.
Calculating Spill Size
Released by The Oil Spill Training Company Limited, The Slick Calculator And Reporter uses the Bonn Agreement Code — an internationally recognized system — to generate its information. The software uses the overall appearance of the oil spill to calculate the volume of oil in the water by the estimated oil thickness.