Carvalho, G.V.; Cabral, M.M.; de Oliveira, A.L.S.C.; Garção, H.F., and Pellegrini, J.A.C., 2020. Methodology to evaluate the coastal susceptibility to oil spills originated in large marine areas – Costa Norte Project. In: Malvárez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 1344–1348. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

Within Costa Norte Project – an R&D project focused on improving the understanding of the vulnerability of mangrove forests to oil spills in the Brazilian Equatorial Margin - the vulnerability concept is understood as composed by three factors: sensitivity, resiliency, and susceptibility. The latter is defined as the exposure level to oil spills and should consider all possible sources of this pollutant. This work presents a methodology to assess the susceptibility of an asset to oil spills that may occur anywhere within a large marine area. It benefits from the development of a multi-source stochastic oil dispersion algorithm to enable the modeling of oil spills originated from hundreds of sources and the development of a methodology to integrate multiple scales with increasingly higher resolutions. Once stored, the results allow the identification of susceptible areas considering a single or a subset of spill sources and the identification of potential origins of spills that may affect specific areas. The choices of the spill sources and the coastal areas to be considered are defined during post-processing, granting flexibility and interactivity exploring the results. The developed methodology presents the potential to assist public management and is illustrated by an offshore scale simulation considering 1,138 oil spill sources distributed along the Brazilian Equatorial Margin integrated to an estuarine scale model, forced by 1-year of metocean data.