Abstract
Abstract. Information acquired and provided in Near Real Time is fundamental in contributing to reduce the impact of different sea pollution sources on the maritime environment. Optical data acquired by sensors aboard meteorological satellites, thanks to their high temporal resolution as well as to their delivery policy, can be profitably used for a Near Real Time sea monitoring, provided that accurate and reliable methodologies for analysis and investigation are designed, implemented and fully assessed. In this paper, the results achieved by the application of an improved version of RST (Robust Satellite Technique) to oil spill detection and monitoring will be shown. In particular, thermal infrared data acquired by the NOAA-AVHRR (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) have been analyzed and a new RST-based change detection index applied to the case of the oil spills that occurred off the Kuwait and Saudi Arabian coasts in January 1991 and during the Lebanon War in July 2006. The results obtained, even in comparison with those achieved by other AVHRR-based techniques, confirm the unique performance of the proposed approach in automatically detecting the presence of oil spill with a high level of reliability and sensitivity. Moreover, the potential of the extension of the proposed technique to sensors onboard geostationary satellites will be discussed within the context of oil spill monitoring systems, integrating products generated by high temporal (optical) and high spatial (radar) resolution satellite systems.
Highlights
Sea oil pollution can derive from different sources
The RST results are compared with those achieved by Cross (1992), which, to enhance the contrast between the oil-polluted areas and clean sea, applied interactively established thresholds to the radiances measured in the AVHRR channel 4, identifying oil spill where T4 > Tmax, being T4 the brightness temperature measured in AVHRR channel 4 and Tmax the “a posteriori” selected threshold
For the sake of brevity, the results obtained by applying the above mentioned indexes for two event images (21 January at 10:31 GMT and 29 January at 11:24 GMT), are shown only for the AVHRR channel 4, as the results achieved in channel 5 are very similar
Summary
Sea oil pollution can derive from different sources. Accidental release of oil into the oceans caused by natural hazards (hurricanes, landslides, earthquakes) or “human errors” (tanker collisions, shipwrecks, platform accidents) have remarkable ecological impact on maritime and coastal environments (Schmidt-Etkin, 2011). In 2005 the Katrina and Rita hurricanes hit oil and gas infrastructures off US-coasts, causing the destruction of more than 113 platforms and the release into the sea of more than 17 000 barrels of crude oil (Hogarth, 2005; Pine, 2006; Cruz and Krausmann, 2008, 2009). While man-made events could probably be prevented by acting in a different way both before and after the accidents, it is more difficult to face natural hazard, which are often unpredictable, both in their appearance and in their consequences
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