The Impact of Pre-Project Data Quality and Quantity on Developing Environmental Monitoring Strategies for Offshore Carbon Storage : Case Studies from the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea

The ACTOM toolbox is designed to provide value over a range of field cases with diverse subsurface geology and environmental marine characteristics. Whereas the end-product of the toolbox is to aid users in defining a monitoring plan that will satisfy local stakeholders, one intermediate outcome from our study is to understand how data quality and availability as well as site variability will affect the development of the monitoring plan. For this assessment we collect and use available data from three representative sites as input to the toolbox: the Gulf of Mexico and northern and southern North Sea to visualize how the output from the semi- automated planning toolbox works in practice. In an ideal setting, hydrodynamic and marine biogeochemical data can be readily attained from calibrated high-resolution models and simulations, combined with available in-situ measurements. The process of identifying data availability, and later gathering and pre-processing the data, will have to be site specific. The technical details of the toolbox, and its components will be presented in another contribution to GHGT-16, here we will demonstrate the preparation steps for the three sites, and how the toolbox can address regional concerns and be tuned to local characteristics