Colloquium-October 21, 2016

Friday, October 21, 2016 (3:15 p.m. in Yost 306)

Title: The World’s Largest Man-Made Disaster: Locating Deepwater Horizon Submerged Oil Spill in Ocean Water Using k-means Clustering

Speaker: Tanujit Dey (Associate Research Staff, Cleveland Clinic Foundation)

Hosted by Wojbor Woyczynski

Abstract: On April 20, 2010, a dramatic  explosion on the Deepwater Horizon “Macondo” oil well drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico caused the largest in U.S. history marine oil spill.  The ecological disaster required a massive coordinated response from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the research community. In this talk I will explore a potential novel way to track oil, especially submerged oil in shallow waters,  based on the statistical k-means clustering data mining methodology, satellite and surface ships observations, and  the widely available relevant software to analyze aggregate observations of temperature, salinity and depth acquired by NOAA. This approach promises precise results produced fast and at low cost. (The paper has been published in 2015 in CHANCE, jointly with W, Hickey, B. Parakkal, and  W. A. Woyczynski).

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