Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
teristics and of the behaviour of the discharged oil, the lack of experience
in dealing with accidental spills and the lack of contextual information at
the time of image interpretation.
The Prestige case highlighted a number of technical/scientific needs,
where additional investigations and technical improvements are necessary.
Many of them are not specific for the oil pollution identification in case of
accidental spilling but are a part of the general problem of detecting and
identifying marine oil pollution from vessels.
Concerning the operational aspect it should be noted that in most cases
the information extracted from satellite images has been delivered to the
end-user in a time largely unsatisfactory. Consequently, even images pro-
viding useful information loose their operational value.
The aspect of minimising the time delay from image acquisition and de-
livery of information to the final user is fundamental, and substantial im-
provements to meet the operational requirements are possible. From a
technical point of view, today it is possible to deliver the interpreted image
to the user within one hour from the satellite pass. Such a time delay may
be acceptable in case of accidental pollution. Then the problem is essen-
tially of organisational nature.
2.2 Experience in the field of operational pollution (mapping of
the oil spills for the seas around Europe)
In the past few years, attention has been given to accidental pollution,
which indeed is a major visible threat. On the contrary, the pollution prob-
lems caused from routine ship operations were not highlighted with the
proper emphasis. In the field of monitoring operational oil pollution, JRC
has acquired in the past years a unique experience via an institutional pro-
ject “Monitoring of Illicit Discharges from Vessels” (MIDIV, see ref.
MIDIV) and via the participation in competitive actions (such as AMED,
RAPSODI, MARSAIS, OCEANIDES, ERUNET, WIN) with different
partners.
Concerning operational pollution, data for the seas around Europe are
not homogeneous. In the North Sea and in the Baltic Sea, regular aerial
surveillance is executed (Figure 3, which reports the results of the aerial
surveillance for the year 2000).
By the way of contrast, there is a lack of data for the other seas. Here-
under the results of JRC activities in the different seas are presented. The
JRC activity has been focused on zones that are defined “special areas” ac-
cording to annex I of the MARPOL convention (see above 1.3), for this
reason the Norwegian Sea, the Bay of Biscay and the Iberian Coast are not
covered. The data type used in these studies was un-calibrated low-resolu-
