MINDORO OIL SPILL PROGRESS MONITORING USING SATELLITE IMAGERY

Abstract. Oil spills in the sea pose a significant threat to marine and coastal ecosystems including corals, sea grasses, and mangroves. Responding to oil spills in the high seas can be challenging and costly, as it is difficult to survey the area using ships or planes. Timely monitoring of extents and direction of drift is costly especially when large area is involved. This study used satellite imagery to monitor the progression of an oil spill in a timely manner. Images captured by various types of sensors was used to provide an almost daily oil extent map. Combining opensource satellite imagery, contributed imagery by commercial providers, and imagery from various national space agencies enabled situational awareness during the oil spill incident. Optical and SAR images were processed by using unsupervised K-means classification, for images that undergone image segmentation, and supervised support vector machine classification. The process was used to produce 46 oil extent maps from 196 satellite images from various sources through Sentinel Asia and The International Charter Space and Major Disasters.