Oil Spill Monitoring Of The Baltic Sea By Commercial Passenger Aircraft

In order to improve the current oil spill monitoring of the Baltic Sea, the article proposes the establishment of a combined monitoring system. The new system should contain today's pollution control aircraft plus in-service aircraft and satellites. Oil spill statistics described in the paper show that these systems would be a good complement and therefore increase the coverage and effectiveness of the present oil spill monitoring. While being a new approach, a detailed description of the proposed use of in-service aircraft is given. We suggest to mount synthetic aperture radar, together with a quick-look processor and an automated feature classification system on board of these aircraft. Selected image patches would be down linked to a ground based operator for visual inspection.