Monitoring the Qingdao Oil Spill Accident Event by Using SAR and Optical Satellite Data

Abstract

A ship collision occurred in the Yellow Sea near the Qingdao port of China at 00:50 UTC on 27 April 2021 due to visibility restriction by sea fog. It caused a huge amount of oil spills into the Yellow Sea from the tanker ship, A Sympony. The target of this study is to remotely detect the oil spill and its coverage as well as detect the ship from which the oil spilled out. For that purpose we have used SAR data from Sentinel-1 and ICEYE, and optical images from Sentinel-1 and Landsat-8 satellites. As much as around 237 km2 area was detected as spilled oil area after 5 days of the accident which is indicating the robustness of its effect. The ships were also detected from the images. Here we combined both detection results and thus correlated that ship as the source of this accident. As future works we would like to automize these detection process so that it can be used for the oil spill and ship monitoring in the sea.