MARINE FORECASTING AND OIL SPILL MODELING IN DUBAI AND THE GULF REGION by

The Coastal Management Section (CMS) of Dubai Municipality (DM) has been operating a coastal zone monitoring program since 2002 with initial emphasis on data collection and establishment of an in-house survey capability. The program has evolved to focus on data analysis and generation of products and interfacing with CMS-operated predictive numerical models. A further evolution is the establishment of a hydrodynamic and water quality forecasting system for the Dubai Coast. One of the uses of high resolution forecasting in Dubai coastal waters is for emergency response to pollution events. DM is working with a number of private consulting companies to integrate monitoring programs and high resolution hydrodynamic models with oil and chemical spill models. This paper discusses the use of oil spill models in the Dubai region with discussion of previous spills and new technology being implemented to improve oil spill predictions in the coastal region. 1