NOAA launches public site to track Gulf oil disaster

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched a slick and data-rich website on Monday that the public can use to monitor the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

GeoPlatform.gov provides visitors with the same information that coordinators in the Gulf use, and is part of a federal outreach effort that includes a two-day trip by President Obama to the region, followed by an Oval Office address to the nation on Tuesday.

The site includes an interactive map that allows the public to track the spread of the oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20 and sank two days later, spewing up to 100,000 barrels of oil a day, according to some estimates. The slick now spreads from the Louisiana Gulf coast to the Florida Panhandle.

NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said the website provides the public with an expansive and detailed geographic picture of the aftermath of the oil disaster, including fisheries closures, wildlife observations, and satellite, radar and aerial imagery of the oil slick.

GeoPlatform.gov is similar to Google Earth, with the interactive map on the site based on multiple clickable layers, which pull information from 325 data sets, according to a fact sheet posted on site.

NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said the site will help the public monitor federal response efforts and also will serve as a tool for those directly affected by the disaster, such as fisherman who need up to stay up to date on areas of the Gulf that are closed to fishing. In addition, GeoPlatform.gov should serve as a valuable resource for state and local agencies responding to the oil disaster, providing loads of information on one Web page.

The site also highlights shoreline cleanup efforts, offshore and near-shore weather forecasts, locations of critical wildlife habitats, shellfish harvesting areas, and seafloor maps.

NOAA officials said they created GeoPlatform.gov in cooperation with University of New Hampshire's Coastal Response Research Center, which developed the Environmental Response Management Application, a Web-based Geographic Information System designed to assist emergency responders and environmental resource managers.

Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Research Center, said the power of the interactive map is it pulls information automatically from a variety of Web resources and then displays that information at the correct location on a map.

The center and NOAA started developing ERMA in June 2007, and then launched a pilot using the harbor in Portsmouth, N.H. Kinner said this is the first time ERMA has been used live on such a large scale.

GeoPlatform.gov also enables the public to track the locations of NOAA research vessels such as the Thomas Jefferson, which is working in the Gulf, but updates will be made only twice a day, Smullen said.

The International Maritime Organization requires ships weighing more than 300 tons and all passenger vessels no matter their size to broadcast their locations on near real time over an Automatic Identification System. The University of the Aegean in Mytilene, Greece, offers live AIS position reports for ships in the Gulf on its website.

ESRI Inc., a geospatial company, has developed a social network map of the Gulf oil spill disaster, combining rich data sets with Twitter and YouTube feeds.

Google also provides multiple data layers to track the slick, including overlays of satellite and data images of the placement of booms to contain the oil. Files must be downloaded to the Google Earth application.