  In case of an ocean oil spill, there are certain areas, e.g. shrimp farms,
which are highly sensitive to small amounts of oil pollution while they are
geographically far from the spill. We investigate the Lattice Boltzmann Method
(LBM) and GNOME, a tool developed and used by NOAA, in terms of far-field
impacts to sensitive areas. We present our simulation results of both models in
limited scale (a sub area of Gulf of Mexico) under the same oil spill condition
using real ocean current data from the Unified Wave Interface-Coupled Model
(UWIN-CM). Our study shows that the kinetic theory based LBM model outperforms
the stochastic particle based GNOME model in accuracy and computation time due
to their fundamental difference in representation of oil pollution advection
and diffusion mechanisms. We propose LBM as a viable alternative to the
Lagrangian particle calculation component of GNOME in modeling the far-field
impacts to highly sensitive areas.
