Assessment of oil spills using Sentinel 1 C-band SAR and Landsat 8 multispectral sensors

Environmental pollution and disasters have gradually increased with the growth of the population. Surveillance of the effects of these incidents is very important for public health. Satellite missions are a very efficient tool for identifying pollutants such as oil spills. The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor is an active microwave sensing system that can be used for oil spill applications with optical sensors mounted on Landsat 8, Sentinel 2, and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellite systems taking into account cloud coverage and revisiting time of the satellite at the same location. In this study, the oil spill area caused by a ship running aground at 13:40 local time (LT) on 18 December 2016 was studied on the coast of Ildr Bay (Izmir, Turkey) with Sentinel 1 SAR and Landsat 8 multispectral sensors. Different image-processing techniques were applied to Landsat 8 bands such as minimum noise fraction (MNF), morphology, and convolution filters in order to highlight the oil spill area related to the incident. In the detection stage, oil slicks and look-alikes were successfully distinguished by analyzing the SAR data with Landsat 8 results and the location of the ship. With the visual interpretation of the results, the selected techniques are consistent with each other in terms of showing oil spill areas.