A large scale monitoring of the hydrocarbons pollution from the Landsat satellite

International audienceThe Landsat satellites have already been used in certain instances for the remote sensing of oil spills at sea. The detection of oil is mainly due to the variations of the glitter radiance between the sea and the oil spill. This property has systematically been used in the framework of the European "Archimedes" project, managed by the Joint Research Center (Ispra, Italy) in order to study the pollution in the Mediterranean Sea. Eight hundred Landsat images were examined for the period 1972 to 1975. After various corrections, mainly allowing for the solar illumination angle, the cumulative area covered by the hydrocarbons spread each year in the Mediterranean Sea is crudely estimated to be 175,000 km2. The usefulness of Landsat for the large scale monitoring of oil pollution at sea as well as for the determination of a pollution reference level is demonstrated. For the time being, Landsat is the only satellite allowing the large scale inventory of oil spills and it could be usefully used as a reference for evaluating the effects of future conservation plans of our marine envrionment