Oil slicks in the Gulf of Guinea – 10 years of Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar observations

[摘要] The Gulf of Guinea is a very active area with respect to maritime traffic as wellas oil and gas exploitation. Due to the failure of some actors to comply withenvironmental standards, this region has been subject to a large number ofoil pollution episodes. This anthropogenic oil pollution is in addition to natural oil seepage fromthe ocean floor. This study aims to detect oil slicks in the Gulf ofGuinea and to analyse their spatial distribution using synthetic-aperture radar(SAR) images. Previous works have already locally mapped oil slicks inthis area; however, to our knowledge, this study is the first to achieve a globalstatistical analysis based on 10 years of radar images covering 17 exclusiveeconomic zones (EEZs) in the Gulf of Guinea. The present study is based on adatabase of 3644 SAR images collected between 2002 and 2012 by theAdvanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) sensor onboard the European Spatial Agency (ESA) Envisatmission, and these images allowed the identification of 18 063 oil slicks. The spatial distribution of these oil slicks is available from Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6470470 (Najoui, 2022b). The oilslicks detected in this work encompass both oil spills of anthropogenic origin and oil seeps of natural origin (natural oil reservoir leaks). Aset of 100 georeferenced oil spills is also available fromZenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6907743 (Najoui, 2022a).

[学科分类] 眼科学