Satellite service covers offshore incident.

Last weekend there was an incident at one of the Norwegian offshore oil installations, resulting in the release of oily substances into the sea water. The offshore installation was covered by an image obtained by the European radar satellite Envisat. The image was upon very short notice included by KSAT into the oil spill detection service provided for the offshore oil industry under a contract with NOFO. KSAT informed NOFO about the detected spill shortly after the satellite image was acquired.

The satellite overflight was app 4 hours after the incident, and the image showed very clearly the oil at the sea surface around the installation. The dark feature in the center left of the satellite image shows the oil. The bright spot just at right edge in the centre of the dark feature is the installation responsible for the incident. The other white spots are other rigs and ships at the offshore field. The satellite observation was confirmed by NOFO as being a correct image of the occurrence. The dark feature in the bottom centre has also been confirmed as another pollution incident from another offshore oil rig.

This example shows that the satellite based oil spill detection service can be an important source for information for monitoring of the effect of operational incidents at sea. The challenge is still to assure the availability of data when really needed. This time the actual area was covered shortly after the incident, but here are other examples where the satellite data was only available after a couple of days. The number of operational satellite will increase in the coming years, and the next one to be applied by the KSAT service from this Summer is the Canadian Radarsat-2 satellite. This new satellite used together with the existing ones will offer an improved coverage but also open for new or improved applications.