New PETROMAKS2 project: “Oil spill and newly formed sea ice detection, characterization, and mapping in the Barents Sea using remote sensing by SAR”

A new project has been granted through the Research Council of Norway’s PETROMAKS2 programme: “Oil spill and newly formed sea ice detection, characterization, and mapping in the Barents Sea using remote sensing by SAR”, grant number 280616.

The project abstract:

This project is a joint effort between UiT The Arctic University of Norway and P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology Russian Academy of Science, and their respective partners. It addresses the urgent need of environmental monitoring of the Barents Sea, with a particular focus on marine pollution from the petroleum industry & shipping and its look-alikes.

The aim of this project is to contribute to improvement of the environmental monitoring capability by satellite of marine pollution. The project pursues this goal by investigating the added value of multipolarization synthetic aperture radar in observing produced water from oilrigs, by looking at the information loss in detection of newly frozen sea ice while going from high resolution multipolarization radar data to data with medium resolution and reduced polarization dimensionality, and finally by development of a detection algorithm for mapping dark surface slicks in the Barents Sea in medium resolution Sentinel-1A and -1B acquisitions.

The outcome of this project has a clear relevance to satellite service providers and oil spill preparedness and clean-up organizations.

The total budget, including in-kind contributions, is 3,348 MNOK. Camilla Brekke is the project leader.