DISPERSION ANALYSIS OF THE OMAN GULF OIL SPILL IN 2017
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Oil spills, Backscatter, Normalized cross section, MEDSLIK.
The oil spills are one of the most impactful sources of marine pollution, detected by SAR sensors as dark areas, regions with low backscatter values. Due to the complex mixture of hydrophobic hydrocarbons, mineral oil spills change the water surface tension, dampening capillary gravitational waves and causing specular reflection. In order to analyze the weathering process of oil spilling into the ocean through radar signal backscattering, we used the case study in the Oman Gulf, which connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz, in March 2017, in which it released approximately 300 gallons of oil. We identified the relationship between the processes of oil weathering, its composition and shape, with changes in the backscatter values of oil spills in the ocean. The method projected zonal sections over the oil spills detected in the SAR images, to extract the backscatter values of each pixel along the section. The internal backscatter values range between -22.5 and -23.5 and indicate that the oil was still chemically bonded and not weathered to the point where it began to interact with seawater. The MEDSLIK-II simulations showed that the oil solubilization rate increased with the wind direction change, increasing the radar signal damping ratio and spreading the oil towards the shore. We observed that the backscatter at the edges of slicks tends to be higher than at the core, and this behavior is associated with the different weathering processes in the oil spill.