Remote Sensing of Oil Spills

Werner Alpers
Institute of Oceanography, University of Hamburg, Germany


Abstract

Mineral oil spills floating on the sea surface are detectable by imaging radars, because
they damp the short surface waves that are responsible for the radar backscattering. The oil
spills appear as dark patches on radar images. However, natural surface films that are often
encountered in coastal regions where the biological activity is high also damp the short
surface waves and thus also give rise to dark patches on radar images. However, oil spills can
often be identified by their shape. Examples of synthetic aperture radar images acquired over
coastal waters by the European Remote Sensing satellites ERS 1 and ERS 2 showing both
types of surface films are presented.

Oil pollution surveillance planes that are operated by several nations bordering the North
and Baltic Sea carry real aperture radars as the prime sensor. Other sensors flown on these
surveillance planes include: (1) microwave radiometers which allow the determination of the
oil thickness, (2) ultraviolet and infrared scanners, which allow the detection of very thin and
very thick oil films, respectively, and (3) laser fluorescence sensors, which allow the
determination of the oil type. Statistical results obtained from the surveillance of the North
and Baltic Sea by the 2 German oil surveillance planes are presented.

Finally, it is noted that remote sensing data can be used for initializing and validating
models that describe the drift and dispersion of oil spills.

Keywords: Oil Spills, Oil Pollution, Biogenic Slicks, Aerial Surveillance System, Radar,
Microwave Radiometer, Laser Fluorosensor, UV/IR Scanner

1 Introduction

Pollution of the sea by mineral oil-spills is one of the major environmental problems.
Increased public pressure has forced national and international organisations to set up
effective legislative protection of the marine and coastal environment over the last 15-20
years. As a result, many countries have signed the MARPOL 73/78 convention which sets
standards for ship discharges, allowing them only beyond certain limits from the nearest coast
and only at very small amounts. Several sea areas have been declared as Special Areas, where
ship discharges are prohibited almost completely. Such Special Areas are the Mediterranean
Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea. However, despite of the MARPOL convention, large
quantities of mineral oil are still discharged in these Special Areas from ships.

Synthetic aperture radar images acquired by the European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-
1 and ERS-2 have been extensively used for obtaining statistical information on oil pollution
(see, e.g., Gade and Alpers, 1999). In particular satellite images are very useful in locating the
preferred areas ("hot spots") where tankers are washed and/or engine room effluents are
discharged.

However, satellite imagery is not very useful in identifying ships from which have spilled
mineral oil. This is because satellite images of a given sea area can only be obtained at
relatively large time intervals and furthermore, the acquisition time is also predictable.
Therefore oil pollution surveillance planes are operated by many countries for fighting illegal
oil pollution in their territorial waters.

2 Mineral Oil Films

Mineral oil floating on the sea surface often originates from ships, but they also can
originate from land-based sources, like refineries and industrial plants, and from sea-based
sources like natural oil seeps and oil platforms. The main contribution of oil pollution
originating from transportation activities comes not from ship accidents, but from routine ship
operations like tank washing and engine effluent discharges (mostly sludge).

Mostly the ships discharge their oily effluents en route, leaving back linear spills. In the
ideal case of discharging in a current-free and calm sea, the resulting overall spill geometry
will follow the route of the ship. Automatic oil detection techniques using radar images often
use this linearity for identifying oil spills generated by moving ships. However, when the ship
is maneuvering or in the presence of a non-uniform surface current, the shape of the spill can
deviate significantly from linearity. When oil is discharged from a ship it will spread also
laterally and will form an elongated V-shaped trail. Typical spreading rates are 0.6 m2/sec.
However, only freshly spilled oil attains this shape. When the spreading comes to the end, the
shape of the spill will be an elongated parallelogram . During their fate in the sea, mineral oil
films are subject to the action of the wind, evaporation of their lighter chemical components,
chemical transformation like photo-oxidation processes and decomposition, as well as to
mixing with sea water (emulsification). Thus, after some time, oil slicks become undetectable
by remote sensing techniques. This time depends on the type of the oil, its quantity and
thickness, and on the environmental conditions. It usually varies between a few days and
several weeks. Winds strongly affect the shape of the oil trail. High winds usually give rise to
a "feathered" structure of the trail. The heavy constituents of oil accumulate always at the
downwind side.

3 Detection of Oil Spills by Radar

Mineral oil and/or other surface-active material floating on the sea surface become visible
on radar images because they damp the short gravity-capillary waves which are responsible
for the radar backscattering. Real aperture radars (RARs) as well as synthetic aperture radars
(SARs) used for monitoring coastal waters for oil pollution usually operate at incidence
angles between 20 and 80 degrees, i.e., at incidence angles where the radar backscattering can
be described by Bragg scattering theory (see, e.g., Valenzuela, 1978). According to this
theory the backscattered radar power is proportional to the amplitude squared of those surface
waves which propagate towards or away from the look direction of the radar antenna and
which have the wavelength sin 2 /
0
=
B
, where
0
is the radar wavelength and is the
incidence angle. These waves are called Bragg waves and have wavelengths in the centimeter
to decimeter range. A precondition for detecting mineral oil spills on the sea surface is that
the wind is strong enough for generating Bragg waves. For X- and C-band radars having radar
wavelengths around 3 and 5 cm, respectively, the threshold for generating Bragg waves lies
between 2 and 3 cm/sec. On the other hand, there is also maximum wind speed above which
oil films become undetectable by radar. At sufficiently high wind speeds, the oil disappears
from the sea surface because it is washed down by breaking waves. Depending on the type of
the oil and the thickness of the oil film, this happens at wind speeds between 10 m/sec and 14
m/sec.
Examples of synthetic aperture radar images of the sea surface acquired by the European
Remote Sensing satellites ERS 1 and ERS 2 showing oil spills are shown in Figures 1-3.

4 Look-Alikes of Oil Spills on Radar Images

Not only mineral oil floating on the sea surface damp the short gravity-capillary waves,
but also surface-active substances of natural origin which are called biogenic slicks. They
damp short gravity-capillary waves with a similar strength than mineral oil films. This makes
it often difficult to decide whether the dark patches, or more accurately, the areas of reduced
backscattered radar power relative to their surroundings, are see areas covered with mineral
oil or biogenic slicks.

Biogenic slicks are natural surface films that consist of surface-active compounds that are
secreted by marine plants or animals. In general, the biogenic surface slicks are only one
molecular layer thick (approximately 3 nanometers). This implies that it needs only few liters
of surface-active material to cover an area of 1 km
2
. At times when the biological productivity
is high, i.e., during plankton blooms, the probability of encountering natural biogenic surface
films is strongly enhanced. In some cases the sea area covered by natural surface films can be
several thousand square kilometers.

Examples of large sea areas covered with natural surface films are shown in Figures 4 and
5. Because the surface films tend to accumulate along convergence zones of current systems,
they render surface current patterns visible on radar images as evident in these images.

What makes things even worse is that dark patches on radar images of the sea surface can
also be caused, e.g., by turbulence generated in the water by the propeller of a ship or by rain
impinging on the sea surface, or by the presence of grease ice which also damps short gravity-
capillary waves. Furthermore, dark patches can also result from reduced wind speed as
encountered, e.g., in the wind shadow behind islands or coastal mountains. Or they can result
from reduced wind stress due to colder sea surface temperatures, as encountered, e.g., in
upwelling regions or in cold plumes from river outflows. The colder water often changes the
stability of the air-sea interface such that the wind speed cannot generate short gravity-
capillary waves.

Thus we conclude that it is often not possible to detect oil films on radar images of the sea
surface unambiguously by the reduction of the radar backscattered radar power which gives
rise to reduction of the radar image intensity relative to the background.

However, the discrimination of mineral oil patches from natural surface films is in most
cases possible by their shape.

5 The German Airborne Surveillance System

Aircraft equipped with a remote sensing instrument for detecting oil pollution in coastal
waters are flown in various countries since the early 1980s (see, e.g., Lodge, 1989). The
objective of these airborne surveillance systems is 1) to detect oil spills over long distances
and register their position and dimension, 2) to measure the thickness distribution of oil spills
and hence the quantity of oil spilled, 3) to identity the ships from which the oil has been
spilled, 4) to support and coordinate cleaning operations following accidental discharges of
large quantities of oil (Gruener et al., 1991).

Since 1983 the Federal Republic of Germany operates an airborne surveillance system for
identifying oil pollution in its territorial waters in the North and Baltic Sea. At present it
consists of two DO 128 aircraft carrying the following sensors:

1) a real aperture radar or side-looking airborne radar (SLAR), 2) a microwave
radiometer(MWR), 3) a laser fluorosensor (LFS), 4) an infrared/ultraviolet line scanner
(IR/UV scanner), and 5) a camera system.

The side looking airborne radar (Gruener et al.,1991) it is the prime sensor on these
aircraft. It can be operated day and night and under all-weather conditions. This sensor is a so-
called far-range sensor which can detect oil spills up to a distance of 30 km in cross-flight
direction. It operates at a frequency of 9.4 GHz (X-band) and has a peak power of 20 kW.

With the microwave radiometer it is possible to measure the thickness of oil spills. In
contrast to the side-looking airborne radar the microwave radiometer is a passive, near-range
sensor which measures the natural (thermal) multi-spectral electromagnetic radiation of
matter in the cm to mm electromagnetic wavelength regime. This is expressed in terms of
brightness temperature. The thickness of the oil film is measured by an interference effect:
The sky radiation reflected at the upper boundary of the oil layer interferes with the radiation
reflected from the lower boundary. When the oil thickness is an odd multiple of a quarter of a
wavelength, then the brightness temperature signal is strongest, and when it is an even
multiple, the brightness temperature signal is weakest. Thus the brightness temperature is an
oscillatory function of the thickness of the oil layer. Its amplitude is of the order of 20 K to 70
K for a 90 GHz radiometer and up to 110 K for a 32 GHz radiometer depending on the sea
state, oil type and oil water mixture (dielectricity constant), atmospheric influences, etc..
However, due to the periodicity of the brightness temperature as a function of the layer
thickness, there is an ambiguity in determining the layer thickness. The ambiguity problem
can be overcome by using a multi-frequency system. The German system operates at 3
frequencies: 18 GHz, 36 GHz, and 89 GHz. This allows to determine the oil layer thickness
unambiguously in the range between 0.05 mm to 3 mm.

The basis of the detection of oil pollution by means of a laser fluorosensor
(Hengstermann and Reuter, 1990) is the spectroscopic property of oil. Crude oil and also fuel
used in ship engines consist of a mixture of different hydrocarbons. These oils ,like most of
complex organic compounds, have the property to fluoresce when exposed to light radiation.
The emitted fluorescent light, compared to the excitation light, is shifted to longer
wavelengths. Information on the type of oil can be obtained from the analysis of the spectral
intensity distribution of the fluorescent light. This instrument is also capable of measuring the
thickness of thin oil films in the range between 0.1 to 20 m

Ultraviolet (UV) channel of the UV/IR scanner registers sunlight reflected from the sea
surface in the ultraviolet wavelength regime. Therefore the sensor can only operate during the
day and when the visibility to the ground is good. Detection of oil is based on the effect that
the reflectivity of the sea surface increases when an oil film is present. An increase of the
reflectivity is observed even when the film has a thickness of less than 0.1 m. The upper
limit of the dynamical range is about 10 m. However, quantitive estimates of the film
thickness are not possible with this sensor.

The infrared (IR))channel of theUV/IR scanner measures the brightness temperature of
the sea surface in the thermal infrared. Temperature differences between oil and water are
induced by the higher absorption of daylight in oil compared with water. This yields a
temperature increase over oil spills by a few degrees compared with the surrounding water
depending on illumination, wind and other factors. Oil films that have thicknesses of about
0.1 mm up to a few millimeters can be detected by the infrared of this scanner. Temperature
differences have been observed also in the dark where the oil appears to be colder, an effect
which is attributed to the lower emissivity of oil in the thermal infrared. However,
quantitative information about the film thickness cannot be obtained from infrared images.

The camera system is used to identify ships which have illegally discharged oil.

In Table 1 results from the German aerial surveillance system obtained in the years 1986-
2000 are graphically displayed. It shows that, on the average, during every second to third
flight an illegal oil spill was observed, but that relatively seldom (in 2000 in about 20% of the
cases) the ship that has caused the pollution could be identified.

6 Oil Drift and Dispersion Models

Numerical models are being used to predict the drift and dispersion of oil following an
accident. The German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (Bundesamt fr
Seeschiffahrt und Hydrographie - BSH) has developed such a model (Dick and Soetje, 1990,
Dick and Mueller- Navara, 2002). These models need remote sensing data as input.
Furthermore, remote sensing data are used for model validation.

The BSH model is a 3-dimensional model that takes into account the meteorological
conditions in the sea area, tidal currents and external surges. An oil spill is represented by a
particle cloud that is transported by winds and currents and undergoes changes in its shape
and its physiochemical properties due to oil weathering processes. In this model the wind-
induced drift of the oil spill in direction of the wind is assumed to be 2.3 % of the wind
velocity. In the past year the BSH model has been used successfully to assist the coastguard in
fighting oil pollution after ship accidents.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the input to this report given by U.Bustorff
(UBustorff@cux.wsd-nord.de) of the German Federal Marine Pollution Control Unit,
Cuxhaven (www.wsv.de/Schifffahrt), T. Hengstermann (theo.hengstermann@optimare.de) of
Optimare GmbH (www.optimare.de), and of S. Mueller-Navarra (sylvin.mueller-
navarra@M1.hamburg.bsh.d400.de) of the German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic
Agency (BSH), Hamburg (www.bsh.de).


0
500
1000
1500
2000
Table 1. Aerial Surveillance Results 1983 - 2001, North- and Baltic - Sea
Identified Polluter Number of Flights Pollutions observed Flight hours Covered Area [km] Est. Quantities [m]
Identified Polluter
11 12 16 13 6 10 10 13 11 23 18 18 15 16 27 35 29 30
Number of Flights 58 230 201 197 251 275 262 226 189 348 255 340 360 427 406 394 468 539
Pollutions observed 104 186 190 119 138 104 160 152 90 267 142 213 210 187 176 217 250 171
Flight hours 72 307 284 493 530 614 576 600 514 942 689 920 1038 1097 1073 1051 1224 1430
Covered Area [km] 241 244 294 273 50 87 150 76 180 443 382 401 934 445 420 778 757 787
Est. Quantities [m] 287 287 287 287 103 77 102 166 60 243 189 218 1795 166 343 220 675 275
83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 2000 2001




ESA
Figure 1: A ship travelling northward (bright spot at the front of the black line) discharging
oil. The oil disperses with time causing the oil trail to widen. This oil trail is more
than 80 km long. (This ERS-1 SAR image was acquired on 20 May 1994 at 14:20
UTC over the Pacific Ocean east of Taiwan; orbit: 14874, frame: 2364, frame
center: 23 01'N, 121 41'E, images area: 100 km x 100 km)


ESA
Figure 2: Oil polluted sea area off the east coast of Malaysia (near Kuantan) which is a busy
shipping lane. The wind blows from an easterly direction causing the feathering of
oil trails. (ThisERS-2 SAR image was acquired on 4 April 1997 at 3:25 UTC over
the South China Sea; orbit: 10221, frame: 3519, frame center: 4 20'N, 103 59'E,
imaged area: 100 km x 100 km)



ESA
Figure 3: Oil polluted area in the Mediterranean Sea northwest of Port Said (near the
entrance to the Suez Canal). Visible are several oil spills of different size and age
which apparently originate from tanker cleanings. The analysis of a large number
of ERS SAR images has revealed that this area is a "hot spot" for tanker cleaning.
(This ERS-1 SAR image was acquired on 1 J une 1992 at 8:31 UTC; orbit: 4589,
frame: 2961, frame center: 31 49'N, 31 49'E, imaged area: 100 km x 50 km)


ESA
Figure 4: Area of the Baltic Sea with the German island of Fehmarn (in the center) and the
Danish island of Lolland (in the upper right-hand section). The sea area is partly
covered with biogenic slicks which are abundant at this time of the year in this
area because it is the time of spring plankton bloom in the Baltic Sea. The slicks
act as tracers for the surface currents associated with eddies and thus render them
visible on the SAR image. (This ERS-2 SAR image was acquired on 10 May 1998
at 21:15 UTC over the Baltic Sea; orbit: 15972, frame: 1089, frame center: 54
28'N, 11 13'E, imaged area: 100 km x 100 km)


ESA
Figure 5: Eddies in the Caspian Sea south of the Volga estuary. This river carries a heavy
load of pollutants originating from fertilizers washed out from agricultural fields
and from industrial and municipal plants. They serve as nutrients for the marine
organisms which experience a rapid growth and then generate biogenic surface
slicks. The oceanic eddies, which become visible on the radar images because the
surface slicks follow the surface currents, are very likely wind-induced. The most
remarkable feature on this image is the mushroom-like feature consisting of two
counter-rotating eddies. (This ERS-2 image was acquired on 12 October 1993 at
18:54 UTC; orbit: 11724, frame: 0891, frame center: 44 45'N, 49 03'E, imaged
area: 100 km x 100 km)

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