Possible Bilge Dumping by Indonesian Cement Carrier in the Strait of Malacca By Lucy Meyer On February 15, 2019, a vessel that appeared to be releasing oily waste was captured by satellite almost 10 kilometers offshore Peureulak, a small town in Aceh Province, on the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Radar imagery […]
Near the northern tip of Indonesia’s Bangka Belitung Islands (located directly below the yellow box within the inset map of image 1), I spotted a slick that resembles clock hands pointing to the hours 4 and 11. Captured by radar satellite, Sentinel-1, on the evening of January 8, 2019 (22:40 GMT), the slick stretches at […]
Practice does not guarantee perfection but it is a diligent educator. During my first week of orientation at SkyTruth, the other interns and I filtered through Sentinel 1 radar satellite imagery on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) online portal, compressed large .tiff image files using the command-line, and constructed final, publishable visuals in QGIS – […]
International Projects This summer, SkyTruth began monitoring bilge dumping “hotspots.” I focused my monitoring efforts in the coastal waters surrounding the United Arab Emirates and Oman or the “tip” of the Arabian Peninsula. I began by visiting the European Space Agency’s datahub (and USGS) daily and downloading tons of imagery. The downloading of imagery was tedious […]
We’ve embarked on an ambitious new project with the help of our stellar team of summer interns (Brady Burker, Flynn Robinson and Brian Wong). We set out to systematically identify and monitor ‘hot spots’ of oil pollution in the world’s oceans. Using freely available satellite imagery, we have identified and mapped several representative ‘hot spots’ […]