Yangtze River estuary is one of the busiest shipping corridors in the world connecting China to the world and coast to inner China. In the middle of the Yangtze River estuary, there is a Qing Cao Sha reservoir providing drinking water to more than 10 million people in Shanghai. Frequent spills near the estuary possess a great threat to drinking water safety to the megacity. Scientists in RPS ASA and SAES have built an online spill simulation and response management system for the Yangtze River Estuary. The online system integrates oil/chemical spill models, operational hydrodynamic model, online met-ocean data, response and resource database with an interactive mapping system. It has been successfully used to simulate the spill trajectory and fate of the spill to coordinate with spill response team.
Here we introduce this online system and present an oil spill response case in the Yangtze Estuary in June 2012 where the model simulation results matched extremely well with the field data observed by the local response team.