Monitoring during “BONNEX-2002”  

The Bonn Agreement (BA) is an international agreement between North Sea coastal states and the EC to execute surveillance as an aid to detect and combat pollution and to prevent violations of anti-pollution regulations. Within the framework of the BA, an operative  co-operation has been established on airborne surveillance, both in co-ordination of flight plans, in standardisation of reporting formats and in improving existing and development of new surveillance techniques.

BA countries have for the past 10 years been using the CONCAWE /Bonn Agreement Color Code as a tool for estimating oil film thickness / oil volume spilt at sea. During the “Color Code project”  (1998-2000) funded by members of the BA, SINTEF carried out a scientifically documented improvement of this oil appearance – thickness correlation methodology. The work resulted in the recommendation of a new “Bonn Agreement Oil Appearance Code” (BAOAC).

As a result of the deliberation, with regard to validation of the new BAOAC, the annual Bonnex-field exercise (outside the Netherlands, June 17-19th) was dedicated and designed experimentally for the validation of the BAOAC. The Bonnex-2002 was organised by the North Sea Directorate in the Netherlands. Three experimental oil spills of Marine Diesel and Intermediate Fuel Oil (IF-30) were released from the response vessel “Arca”. Surveillance aircraft, from 5 BA countries and more than 30 operators/aerial observers participated during the exercise. The main objectives of the Bonnex 2002 were:

to validate the BAOAC by comparing visual assessment by BA operators with ground-truth film thickness measurements and still-photo documentation taken from the sampling boats.
to investigate the scaling effects (identify whether visual observations vary from different altitudes: 500, 1500 and 2500 feet)
The SINTEF scientists Per Daling and Frode Leirvik were responsible for the ground-truth surface oil sampling. Due to optimal weather conditions a unique data-set of surface oil samples was collected, and is under processing and analysis in the SINTEF laboratories.

Contact at SINTEF Materials and Chemistry: Per Snorre Daling