Telaer is an advanced airborne remote sensing system for environmental monitoring and management. It is constituted by two aircrafts equipped with optical and microwave sensors. During the recent environmental crisis caused by the Prestige shipwreck, the operation of the Telaer system provided with an X-band SAR system mounted on a Learjet 35A, has been requested by the Spanish authorities. The Galicia campaign was aimed to perform daily missions on the Prestige sink area in order to monitor the status of the process of oil spilling out of the sunken ship hull. SAR data have been processed in real time on board for a first guess of oil slicks detection; next, on ground, the images have been geo-referenced and processed in near real time (within 4 hours from acquisition) for a more accurate identification, size estimation and localization of oil slicks. This information has been validated against external sources, based on visual recognition during helicopters and planes over-flights of the surveyed zone. During the Galicia campaign 16 missions were carried out with a total of more than 50 flight hours. The results obtained during such a campaign will be shown.

Date Published: 12 January 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5236, SAR Image Analysis, Modeling, and Techniques VI, (12 January 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.516765

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5236:
SAR Image Analysis, Modeling, and Techniques VI
Francesco Posa, Editor(s)