A Novel Iterative Estimation Technique Using Radar Sensing to Remotely Characterize Oil Slicks During Spills

For environmental and financial reasons, it is critical to develop new monitoring techniques that reduce the damage to the world’s marine ecosystems from oil spills. Information about the oil spill, such as the distribution of its thickness and its physical characteristics, will help in effective spill containment and tactical countermeasures. In this paper, based on radar sensing, we develop an iterative maximum-likelihood estimation approach to remotely extract both required information: the slick thickness and a physical characteristic of spilled slicks represented by the relative permittivity (dielectric constant). The targeted ranges are 1-10 mm thicknesses for thick oils, and 1.9-3.3 relative permittivities for light and crude oils. Results prove the performance accuracy of the proposed iterative approach with few iterations.