Gulf Oil Spill Impact on Yacht Charters Update

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched a new public site Monday, June 14, that allows visitors to monitor the Gulf oil spill. GeoPlatform.gov, constructed much like Google Earth, gives access to the same information used by recovery officials, including an interactive tracking map, seafloor maps, offshore and near-shore weather forecasts, satellite, radar and aerial imagery and live AIS reports for ships in the Gulf.

Created in cooperation with University of New Hampshire’s Coastal Response Research Center, the interactive map pulls information automatically from a variety of Web resources and then displays that information at the correct location on a map.

Additional contributors to the site include ESRI Inc., which has developed a social network map of the Gulf oil spill that integrates with Twitter and YouTube feeds. Google provides multiple data layers to track the slick, including overlays of satellite and data images of the placement of booms to contain the oil.

BP announced that it plans to send more vessels to the spill with a goal to triple their capacity to capture oil by the end of this month, and recover as much as 80,000 barrels by mid-July.