It’s been a relatively quiet hurricane season in the northern Gulf so far this year – knock on wood – but right now a tropical storm is gaining strength and moving north off the Yucatan Peninsula and into the central part of the Gulf. The current forecasts show Karen strengthening to Category 1 (the weakest […]
On August 6, SkyTruth and four other environmental organizations comprising the Gulf Monitoring Consortium (GMC) announced their findings from a review of pollution reported from petrochemical and fossil fuel processing facilities during and immediately after Hurricane Isaac. Based self-reporting by “responsible parties” to state and federal authorities, GMC members found operators blamed the storm for […]
So now maybe we’ll get some answers: last week a judge threw out two motions filed by Taylor Energy to dismiss the lawsuit filed against them by Waterkeeper Alliance (one of the founding members of the Gulf Monitoring Consortium) for their chronic leak in the Gulf of Mexico that’s been spilling oil 24/7 from a […]
We’ve been using the new Landsat-8 satellite imagery to help monitor pollution events in the Gulf of Mexico. With a spatial resolution of 25 meters, this imagery is much more detailed than the twice-daily MODIS imagery (250 meters) that we used throughout the BP / Deepwater Horizon spill. But it takes a lot more Landsat […]
You may recall that sporadically throughout 2011 and 2012, satellite images and several aerial overflights of the BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill site revealed thin, recurring oil slicks in the area. No known natural seeps were in the vicinity. One obvious possibility is that the slicks were caused by residual oil, trapped in the […]