USING SATELLITE SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR IMAGERY TO MAP OIL SPILLS IN THE EAST CHINA SEA

Oil pollution of the ocean is a major environmental problem, especially in its coastal zones. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) flown on satellites, such as ERS-2 and Envisat, has been proved to be a useful tool in oil spill monitoring due to its wide coverage, day and night, and all-weather capability. The total 120 SAR images containing oil spill over the East China Sea were collected and analyzed, ranging in date from July 23, 2002 to November 11, 2005. After preprocessed, SAR images were segmented by adaptive threshold method. The oil spill images were incorporated into GIS after distinguished from look-like phenomena, finally we presented the oil spills distribution map for the East China Sea. The wide-swath and quick-looks SAR imagery for mapping of oil spill distribution over large marine areas were proved to be useful when full resolution data are not available. After the temporal and spatial distribution of the oil spills were analyzed, we found that most of oil spills were distributed along the main ship routes, which means the illegal discharge by ships, and the occurrence of oil spill detected on SAR images acquired during morning and summer is much higher than during evening and winter.