by slinkerwink
Two of the scientists on the National Flow Rate Technical Group are disagreeing with how the estimates were put out by the group. The current federal estimate is that the oil spill ranges from 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil per day. Here's the story on the disagreement with the oil spill estimate: The 12,000-to-19,000-barrel estimate was based on individual estimates from three different methods: one that used satellite images to study the amount of oil on the surface of the water, one that analyzed video of the underwater oil "plume," and one that analyzed the amount of oil collected by the Riser Insertion Tube Tool (RITT) that BP installed last week to capture some of the escaping oil. But it was impossible for members of the team that analyzed the oil plume video to estimate the upper boundary of the oil spilled, according to the Ira Leifer, a researcher at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Steven Wereley, a researcher at Purdue University. That means that what we have is not a full actual range of the numbers of barrels spilled per day, and that this is a lowball estimate.
continued at Daily Kos....
