Publications
The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill likely affected ecosystem services in the Gulf of Mexico. To test this hypothesis, we configured a “Ecopath with Ecosim” model and quantified the effects of commercial fisheries and particulate organic carbon (POC) sequestration from 2004 to 2014, encompassing DWH. Read more “The Effect of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on two Ecosystem Services in the Northern Gulf of Mexico”
Publications
Major oil spills immensely impact the environment and society. Coastal fishery-dependent communities are especially at risk as their fishing grounds are susceptible to closure because of seafood contamination threat. Read more “Predicting the Impact of Future Oil-Spill Closures on Fishery-Dependent Communities—A Spatially Explicit Approach”
Publications
The depletion of readily accessible oil reservoirs in conjunction with the demand for fossil fuels leads to the exploration and production of remote deposits, esp. in the deep sea. Operations at hard-to-reach locations far beyond atmospheric conditions are challenging and associated with elevated risk, Read more “Deep Sea Oil Spills-Investigating Droplet Size Distributions and Oil Fate in Experiments and Modeling”
News - Archived
Dr. Villy Kourafalou is a Research Associate Professor at UM’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, where she leads the Coastal and Shelf Seas Group in the Division of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography. She is also the co-Director of the Ocean Modeling and Observing System Simulation Experiments joint center with the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Her research focuses on numerical modeling of circulation and transport on continental shelves and marginal seas, including coastal processes influenced by land runoff, weather events and deep sea oceanic currents.