Oil Spill Detection and Monitoring from Satellite Image

Introduction The very nature of marine oil spills massive quantities covering vast areas open ocean and/or coastline necessitates the use of satellite remote sensing to supplement other aerial observations. Remote sensing instrumentation is constrained to work in areas of the electromagnetic spectrum, which transmit sufficient quantities of radiation such as the microwave, thermal, near infrared, visible and near ultraviolet. Within these windows, there is usually further attenuation of radiation by cloud cover and inclement weather. In general, satellites using electrooptical detectors have problems seeing through cloud cover and at night. There is also problems with the majority of optical remote sensing techniques used for oil spill detection which is the high number of false alarms; i.e. oil slick look-a-likes, phenomena which give rise to signals which appear to be oil but are not (O’Neil, 1983; Goodman, 1989 and 1992; Schnell, 1992; Thornton, 1992;). Visible satellite systems are susceptible to false alarms due to sun glint, wind sheen, bottom features, cloud shadows, and biogenic material such as surface weeds and sunken kelp beds (Goodman, 1988 and 1989; Fingas et al., 1990 and 1992).