Oil Spill emergency response mapping for coastal area using SAR imagery and GIS

Abstract

Oil spill disaster is unexpected accident occurs through failures in operations, transportations, ship accidents, human errors or due to other disasters such as flood and earthquake. Most of oil spills happen in coastal and sea environment that make the emergency response for the accident much difficult and complicate. Intricate operations involve through complexity of sea and coastal conditions, especially in bad weather where the access to the accident site is difficult. Management of such event needs an organized contribution, covering all procedures of disaster operation from monitoring and detection to mitigation and relief. This paper presents methods of SAR image and GIS technology applications for oil spill management in coastal area. The developed framework is based on automatic detecting and mapping of oil spills in SAR image and provision of oil spill location and extent map which includes information about the spill thicknesses and geographic references such as major towns and features along the coastal area. The output from SAR image processing then transferred into oil spill trajectory simulation model to simulate the next destinations of oil spill. Oil spill trajectory predicts the movement, spreading, and coastal impact of oil spill in the marine environment. The output vectors from trajectory simulation used as input data for creating other disaster products including oil spill risk map, affected area map and emergency response map. Each product demonstrates the results from various analyses aspects, include situational analysis, risk analysis, damage analysis, and emergency response analysis using satellite SAR image in GIS and image analysis software. All the models and applications are described and depicted.