On May 26, a U.S. government expert panel, the Flow Rate Technical Group, released an official government estimate of the spill rate from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, estimating that oil is gushing from it at a rate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.

That estimate quickly attained “the most reliable estimate” status, and has since been trotted out by everyone, both media and bloggers. Except that, for some reason, almost everyone prefers to go with the 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day range that the Flow Rate Technical Group itself pushed, even though its own upper-end estimate is 25,000 barrels a day.

The Flow Rate Technical Group estimate displaced other estimates produced by scientists.

On April 30, the WSJ reported (subscription required) that “Ian MacDonald, professor of oceanography at Florida State University who specializes in tracking ocean oil seeps from satellite imagery” had concluded the “oil spill could be leaking at a rate of 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government’s current estimate”. Ian MacDonald is also certified by the NYT as “an expert in the analysis of oil slicks”.
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Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

But here’s the funny thing about the estimate that walks on water. Over to Ira Leifer of the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara, a member of the Flow Rate Technical Group; he’s speaking just after the panel’s official estimate was released:

The Flow Rate Technical Group, to date, has only about seven minutes of video showing a lot of variability from very low to very high flows, and is being asked to extrapolate seven minutes of BP low-quality video to three weeks. I am very uncomfortable taking a BP-selected time segment and concluding that it is representative of the emission rate over the entire time period.

Somehow those salient facts never made it into U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt‘s official announcement of the estimates. Nor have they received any real attention in the media.

That’s funny, right? Maybe even funnier. But certainly not funniest.

Because the funniest thing is that live streaming video feeds of the spill became publicly available several days before the Flow Rate Technical Group released its estimates.

Live video of the spill is hosted by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida and BP.

If the Flow Rate Technical Group had any self-respect, or commitment to scientific accuracy, it would have gone back and done a more careful analysis based on the live streaming video. The fact that it didn’t tells us all we need to know about the independence and reliability of its analysis.