Ethan is a Junior Machine Learning Engineer at SkyTruth.
We are updating Cerulean, our tool for tracking global marine oil pollution, to enhance support for users tracking very recent pollution events. The new release evaluates oil slick detections in near real-time as public satellite imagery becomes available to support faster identification of potential incidents within a few hours of image capture.
In July 2025, we ran a focused four week Research and Development (R&D) sprint to test how open-access satellite imagery could be used to detect methane emissions from offshore oil and gas infrastructure, which is a notoriously hard-to-detect, under-monitored source of climate pollution. This post shares what we set out to do, what we built, what we learned, and where we plan to go next.
A primary goal of SkyTruth’s global oil pollution detection tool, Cerulean, is to automatically attribute oil slicks to potential polluters.