Potential analysis of maritime oil spill monitoring based on MODIS thermal infrared data

Remote sensing is a mayor way of oil spill monitoring nowadays. Compared to these active sensors, such as NIR or SAR, thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing also have capability to identify oil on backgrounds that include water, soil, ice and snow, in terms of its useful covering the TIR bands which can monitor the thermal radiance difference between them. The difference in the thermal radiance properties of oil and sea water retrieved from radiance allow potential discrimination. The essential objective in this work is to use in-situ sea surface temperature (SST) data retrieved by MODIS SST algorithm, obtain SST image information, and identify oil film from sea water. Furthermore by means of thermal infrared mapping, the feature dependent on oil film temperature change can contribute to discriminate the thickness change and trend of oil film, which is crucial to oil spill contingency planning. In both cases, the thermal infrared remote sensing obtained demonstrated the ability to achieve good results.