Authors: Steve Wereley, Kristina Bross, Derrick Kearney, Christopher Smoak, Michael Zentner

Last summer the Gulf of Mexico was subject to the worst ever oil spill in US history. In order to plug the damaged well, a fleet of Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) was brought in. Each of these vehicles is operated via video camera. All of the ROV footage was offered to Purdue by Rep Markey and Sen Boxer. Purdue's ITaP team developed a hub to stream these videos to the general public to make them widely available. The general public, media, and scientific communities have found them useful and have visited the hub. In order to help users interpret and work with the videos several tools have been developed. These include a journal tool to log comments on each of the videos, where interesting events occur, etc., as well as photogrammetry tool that allows users to determine the size of features seen in the videos by scaling according to some feature of known size. The photogrammetry tool also allows users to mark points in one frame and track the motion of fluid features across several frames. Both of these tools are being used in the English/American Studies class, Oil and Water.

Professor Wereley has bachelor degrees in Physics (Lawrence University, 1990) and Mechanical Engineering (Washington University, St. Louis, 1990) followed by masters and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University (1992 and 1997). He is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University where he has been working since 1999 and a Fellow at the Center of Smart Interfaces, Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany). Professor Wereley served as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Technische Universität Darmstadt (2007) and Universität der Bundeswehr (2009). His current research interests focus on fluid flows in microscopic domains, commonly known as microfluidics. Professor Wereley is the co-author of the monographs Fundamentals and Applications of Microfluidics (Artech House, 2002 and 2006) and Particle Image Velocimetry: A Practical Guide (Springer, 2007). The latter book led to his involvement with the oil spill.

Kristina Bross is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997. She has received both a National Endowment for the Humanities and a Fulbright fellowship as well as the Murphy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education at Purdue. A member of the executive committee for the Society of Early Americanists, she will become the vice-president in June, 2011. Author of books and journal articles on early American literature and culture, her interests in the history of violence and catastrophe in America led to the construction of an American Studies undergraduate class, "Oil and Water: Literature, Science, and Disaster." In this course, students take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including close consideration of fiction, poetry, and visual art created in response to these two Gulf of Mexico disasters.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Steve Wereley; Kristina Bross; Derrick Kearney; Christopher A Smoak; Michael Zentner (2011), "Using HUBzero to Distribute and Enable Analysis of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Videos," https://help.hubzero.org/resources/428.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. Hubbub 2011