On the Use of Simulated Airborne Compact Polarimetric SAR for Characterizing Oil–Water Mixing of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Abstract

Compact polarimetry (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a form of coherent dual-pol SAR that has been shown to have great potential for maritime surveillance applications such as ship and ice detection. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of CP data for oil spill characterization. As the availability of CP data is limited at this time, we simulate CP image data from UAVSAR L-Band quad-polarized images. We reconstruct quad-pol SAR data (termed pseudo-quad) from these simulated CP SAR data, and calculate an oil–water mixing index, termed Mdex. We show that the differences between the pseudo-quad and quad-pol Mdex maps are negligible. This contributes to the case that CP SAR has great potential for multiple applications in maritime surveillance.