Project Overview

Summary:

In January 2018, Dr. Eric Chassignet at the Florida State University, was awarded an RFP-VI grant totaling $2,819,179 to lead the GoMRI project entitled “Consortium for Simulation of Oil-Microbial Interactions in the Ocean (CSOMIO)” which consisted of 7 collaborative institutions and approximately 26 research team members (including students).

The overarching goal of this project was to synthesize recent developments in numerical modeling and results from field- and laboratory-based studies in order to fundamentally advance understanding of how microbial biodegradation influences accumulation of petroleum in the water column and in marine sediments of the deep ocean and the shelf.  A major focus of this work was the development of the CSOMIO Coupled Modeling System, which simulates ocean hydrodynamics, biogeochemistry, the microbial community, sediment processes, and hydrocarbons released from an oil spill along with the interactions between these components.  This tool can be applied to investigate the impacts of potential future oil spills under different temperatures, oxygen levels, suspended particulate matter, transport, and bathymetric regimes, all of which would influence biodegradation.

This Consortium brought together a select team of investigators with a diverse array of expertise to synthesize their scientific, technological, and data products into a framework that will be used to gain a more complete understanding of the interaction of oil with shelf and deepwater marine ecosystems. Our team sought to answer questions such as:

• How does the rate of biodegradation of petroleum differ in shelf sediments versus deepwater sediments, and how would this change for locally released (i.e., a shelf spill) oil deposited onto shelf sediments versus aged oil deposited onto sediments on the shelf after advection from a deepwater spill?
  
  
• How would the oil delivery pathways differ when the oil spill occurs in a region of high turbidity, such as during a major river discharge event with high sediment, nutrients and freshwater inputs, or during a period of large resuspension associated with storm events?
  
  
• How would the biodegradation of petroleum be affected if the spill were to occur, or be advected to, a region experiencing hypoxic conditions?

Research Highlights

As of June 30, 2020, this project’s research resulted in 4 peer-reviewed publications, 1 book chapter, 57 scientific presentations, and 18 datasets being submitted to the GoMRI Information and Data Cooperative (GRIIDC), which are/will be made available to the public. Numerous additional manuscripts are in preparation highlighting the work of CSOMIO over the past two-and-a-half years and are expected to appear in forthcoming peer-reviewed journals, including a special issue led by members of the Consortium. An important legacy of CSOMIO is the CSOMIO Coupled Modeling System, which, being based on a model with a large user community, provides a tool that can readily be applied by individuals involved in oil spill research and response. The project also engaged 7 Ph.D. students and 3 postdocs over its award period. Significant outcomes of our project’s research are highlighted below.

• A coupled modeling system for simulating oil – sediment – biogeochemical interactions in the ocean with explicitly simulated microbial biodegradation was developed by adding new capabilities to the ROMS (Regional Ocean Modeling System) within the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment Transport (COAWST) framework.  The new CSOMIO Coupled Modeling System allows for tracking hydrocarbons from an oil spill as they move and undergo transformations within the oil modeling component, form oil-mineral aggregates entering the sediment modeling component, and are consumed by microbes simulated within a biogeochemical modeling component.  Coupling the modeling components required the development of new techniques for two-way mapping between hydrocarbon concentration fields and the oil modeling component’s Lagrangian framework. The new coupled modeling system features the capability of running in an “offline” fashion in that output from a previously run hydrodynamic model is used to force the coupled modeling system with longer time steps for dramatically improved computational speed.  Using this approach, the system can be readily adapted by a large community of users for application in many regions of the ocean that already have ROMS configurations running, or can be rapidly configured for a new region by assimilating data from a different analysis/forecast model.   
• A new numerical modeling module, called OPAMOD, was developed based on previous model formulations and new laboratory studies conducted as part of CSOMIO to simulate the formation and settling of oil-particle aggregates (OPAs).  OPAMOD was implemented into the CSOMIO Coupled Modeling System and is valuable for understanding processes affecting oil spills in high sediment environments such as within river plumes. 
• New laboratory experiments applied new laboratory instrumentation to characterize formation and settling rates of oil-mineral aggregates and sediment flocs, providing valuable data for use in parameterizing and validating OPAMOD and sediment flocculation modeling routines.  These experiments applied a second generation of the LabSFLOC2 (Laboratory Spectral Flocculation Characteristics Instrument), a microscopy imaging and analysis system.  Two journal manuscripts and associated datasets were published with these results.
• A recent biogeochemical model that simulates the emergent microbial community in a marine environment (the GENOME model) was adapted to allow for simulation of the microbial biodegradation of hydrocarbons.  The simulated microbial community evolves with the introduction of elevated hydrocarbon concentrations due to oil and gas release (through spills or seeps), thus affecting the marine ecosystem and biogeochemistry simulated by this model.  An important modification to this model for coupling with the oil spill modeling component was the rewriting of GENOME to use carbon (as opposed to nitrogen) as the model “currency.”  To enhance computational speed, a reduced version of this model, the CSOMIO biogeochemical model, uses a pre-determined set of microbes with hydrocarbon-degrading capability adapted from the emergent community-based model.

Outreach Highlights

As of June 30, 2020, CSOMIO research team members have participated in more than 70 outreach related activities including: school presentations, invited talks, summer camps, social media engagement, and more.  Here are a few of our key outreach products and activities:

• During summer 2019, CSOMIO developed and implemented, in collaboration with a number of summer camps and after-school programs in northeast Florida, an ocean science outreach initiative. During the month of July, we visited nine different locations and interacted with nearly 200 children (Kindergarten-5th grade). The visits included hands-on demonstrations and activities centered around ocean water cycling, marine microbes, and pollutants (e.g., oil, plastics) in the Gulf of Mexico.  

• CSOMIO published Modeling the Gulf of Mexico: A Middle School Science Curriculum. The “Modeling the Gulf” curriculum contains five lesson plans related to ocean modeling, including the fields of biogeochemistry, fluid dynamics, and microbiology. This curriculum uses the “5-E” instructional framework. Each of the 5 “E”s describes a phase of learning: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. The 5E instructional framework allows students and teachers to experience common activities, to use and build on prior knowledge and experience, to construct meaning, and to continually assess their understanding of a concept. The guide can be accessed at https://csomio.org/education-and-outreach/modeling-the-gulf-middle-school-curriculum.

 Proposal Abstract - RFP-VI PI Eric Chassignet