Detection of oil pollution on sea ice with airborne and spaceborne spectrometer

In this work we demonstrate the feasibility of imaging spectrometer for the detection of oil spills on sea ice. We show that optical spectrometer images can be used as an alternative for oil spill mapping in winter when SAR-based detection algorithms fail due to ice. By comparing high-resolution airborne spectrometer image to satellite images, we evaluate the usability of MODIS and Landsat images for oil pollution detection on ice and discuss the limitations, set by image resolution and spectral band availability. We evaluate here several spectral indices and discuss the results. We propose simple algorithms for oil detection on ice. Our study strongly suggests that an imaging spectrometer suits very well to oil detection on sea ice. However usability of satellite instruments like MODIS have serious limitations set by the image resolution and band selection. Landsat ETM has significantly better resolution and it is therefore more suitable for most typical, small-scale pollution detection, but its imaging frequency does not meet the monitoring demands