VizWorld.com

As if the Oil Spill wasn’t bad enough, now BP has gone and shown us another level of ineptitude: Their complete lack of Photoshop skills.  A series of images has been released by various BP organizations purportedly showing just how hard they’re working on solving the Gulf Oil Crisis.  Sadly, the images are fabrications, and not very good ones.

The first one found was this image of the BP Command Center.

Several people have dissected this image (Gizmodo, Ameriblog) and have very detailed zooms showing how BP, for some unknown reason, decided to replace blank monitors with video footage.  In particular, the guy on the right seems to be staring at some kind of Sun chart?  In reality, he was staring at a screen with nothing but a white line on it, some of which you can still see on either side of his head.

Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

Click for the fullsize.  Once again, even moreso actually, you can easily see the blurred edges of the water and the oddly placed air traffic control tower in the upper left.  If you look very closely, you can even read the dash instruments which say they are hovering a mere 1 foot off the ground.  Gizmodo breaks it down quite well:

And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that the helicopter’s height is 1 foot, and that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. It speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can’t afford to treat it with anything but total candor.

If you find any more, let us know in the comments!

Graphics bad, bp, disaster, oil, photoshop

Slashdot | NSF Gives Supercomputer Time For 3D Model of Spill

Computerworld | Researchers race to produce 3D models of BP oil spill

Acting within 24 hours of receiving a request from researchers, the National Science Foundation late last week made an emergency allocation of 1 million compute hours on a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas to study how the oil spreading from BP’s gusher will affect coastlines.

The goal is to produce models that can forecast how the oil may spread in environmentally sensitive areas by showing in detail what happens when oil interacts with marshes, vegetation and currents.

What may be just as important are models that simulate what could happen if a hurricane carried the oil miles inland, said researchers in interviews.

This is the best use of the government’s scientific funds on this horrible disaster yet. Looking forward to images from and analyses of the model runs.

Science 3d, disaster, modeling, oil&gas, oilspill

Several GIS companies have quickly come together to pool their resources at tracking the growing Gulf Oil Spill via ArcGIS Online.  ESRI and others are posting maps, predictions, and satellite imagery to aid in coordination of recovery efforts.  From AnyGeo:

Users and emergency responders working in the area are invited to contact the team in order to join the group and share their related apps, services, data and resources. See the ArcGIS Online (BETA) ESRI Gulf Oil Spill Response
To date several interesting web services have been published including:

• Gulf coast oil spill plume showing approx trajectory
• Environmental Sensitivity map
• Electronic navigational charts

I agree with AnyGeo, KUDOS to ESRI for picking up the challenge!

ArcGIS Online – Group Content.

Science disaster, esri, gis, gulf, oil