Satellite Solutions for Tracking Litter & Plastic Pollution in the Ocean

The authors propose to improve litter and plastic pollution tracking in the Ocean through a combined solution that includes tracking from space and a drift modelling service based on surface currents derived from Earth Observations satellites. Tracking litter-like transmitters at sea helps in improving our understanding and in identifying the main marine debris hotspots by providing a realistic idea of how debris travel on currents. This approach proposes additional in situ tracked buoys deployment to better describe the chaotic movement of marine debris. The second approach involves long-term surface drift modelling based on Copernicus ocean monitoring and forecasting products. It simulates the marine debris pathways from littering sources and maps macro plastic hotspots. The marine litter tracking buoys positions and the long-term drift modelling study results can be displayed through a web interface that is also part of the proposed solution. It provides the following displaying functionalities: location of each tracked buoy, long-term drift modeling trajectories, probability grid and heatmap ("hotspots") for each littering source.