Protecting oceans from illicit oil spills: environment control and remote sensing using spaceborne imaging radars

Abstract

Oceans are the largest ecosystems of our planet and the most abused ones. Accidental and intentional pollution continue to damage the marine environment to unfathomable scale and consequences. We present the problem of illicit vessel oil discharges on oceans and discuss the technological solutions possible through spaceborne radar imaging. We highlight various milestones and important historical developments in this domain applied to ocean oil spill monitoring and environment control. We introduce different detection techniques and evaluate their performance for detecting illicit oil spills on oceans. Finally, we discuss the current status, highlight some of the open challenges and possible future directions for spaceborne radar imaging of the oceans.

Keywords:

• Radar remote sensing
• spaceborne imaging
• synthetic-aperture radar – SAR
• target identification
• oil spill
• ocean monitoring
• environment control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Krishnaswamy Sankaran http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7099-2728

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Thanks to the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy for supporting this research. This work is part of the ongoing research in Radical Innovations Group – RIG.

Notes on contributors

Krishnaswamy Sankaran

Dr Krishnaswamy Sankaran is an established industrialist with several years of experience in energy, utilities, metals, mining, infrastructure, production, and recycling industries. He is presently the Chief Executive Officer of the Radical Innovations Group AB, Finland. He designed and runs one of the world’s largest fully online programme on computational electromagnetics and applications. He received doctorate in engineering sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, Switzerland, masters from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, Germany, and a joint executive masters in organisational development and leadership from Wharton School, Columbia University, INSEAD, and London Business School. He is a recognised thought leader and keynote speaker in many international forums. He has several years of training in Advaita philosophy. For more information check: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drksankaran/.