Oil spill detection radar
SeaDarQ Seadarq

he SeaDarQ oil spill detection system works on the principle that oil on the water surface reduces sea surface roughness and dampens wind waves. In the case of an oil slick, the sensitive receiver experiences a reduction in back scattered radar power creating dark structures in the radar images denoting the polluted area.
Conventional methods of measuring oil spills use airborne and satellite radar (SLAR and SAR), such as carried by the Netherlands Coast Guard aircraft and the European ERS satellites. While satellite and airborne radar have an advantage using a high angle (between 70 and 20 degrees) and high contrast between the unpolluted sea surface and the oil spill, they remain a single pass, single sweeping imaging technology which records only a moment in time. The SeaDarQ oil spill detection system, on the other hand, records a number of consecutive images and integrates these together to show a real time, continuous monitoring of oil spills. The amalgamation of images reduces problems of multiplicative noise and overcomes the low contrast and low angle of the radar. This is because one single image of the polluted area is not enough to register the low contrast between the sea surface and the oil slick. Typically, 64 revolutions of the antenna are required to filter and process reflections of the radar energy and to produce an image. In other words, it takes about one and a half minutes to produce a continuous real time image of an oil spill, after which a new image is automatically added.