Oil Spill

See It, Change It

Twenty years of SkyTruth success

December 21, 2021/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, BP, Climate, Coal, Conservation Vision, Deepwater Horizon, Fishing, General, Gulf Monitoring Consortium, Gulf of Mexico, Hydraulic Fracturing, Impact stories, Mining, Mountaintop Mining, Oceans, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill, Overfishing and Illegal fishing, Protected Area Monitoring, Public Lands, SkyTruthing, Watchdog, Wildlife Conservation /by Amy Mathews

Satellite technology has changed but SkyTruth remains true to its core principles, with an impressive track record of holding industries and governments accountable.

As 2021 draws to a close, SkyTruth is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an environmental tech nonprofit. It’s hard for us to believe how far SkyTruth — and technology — have come in those 20 years, and how much we have accomplished. In 2022 we’re poised to grow even more; doubling the size of the SkyTruth team and magnifying our ability to use technology to promote conservation for people and the planet. Read on to join us on our journey from very humble beginnings to high-tech innovators.

People & Places

SkyTruth Alerts helps Healthy Gulf track pollution

November 15, 2021/in Alerts, Gulf of Mexico, Impact stories, Oceans, Offshore, Offshore Drilling, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill /by Amy Mathews

With the intense concentration of polluters and frequent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the watchdog group Healthy Gulf relies on Alerts to flag dangerous incidents.

Naomi Yoder works as a geospatial analyst for the environmental group Healthy Gulf identifying pollution events, tracking trends and pushing for reform to reduce pollution. “SkyTruth Alerts is so useful. I can’t say it enough.”

See It, Change It

The Huntington Beach oil spill: How SkyTruth investigates environmental incidents

October 27, 2021/in Alerts, Oil Spill /by Johnna Armstrong

SkyTruth Alerts is our go-to tool for monitoring and investigating incidents like the Huntington Beach Oil Spill.

We’re often asked how we do our work here at SkyTruth, particularly when a major environmental event makes the news. Over the past few weeks the SkyTruth team has used tools available in SkyTruth Alerts along with vessel tracking data to investigate the Huntington Beach oil spill. In this blog post, we share how we investigated this spill, so that you can use the same techniques to monitor the places you care about.

SkyTruth Spotlight

Jona Raphael: Small town, big perspective

September 16, 2021/in Bilge Dumping, Biodiversity, Climate, Oceans, Oil & Gas, Oil Spill, Team /by Amy Mathews

SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door.

“I’ve always had an interest in sustainability,” Jona says. At SkyTruth, that interest translates into developing Cerulean, a machine learning model that automatically processes thousands of satellite images a day to detect oil pollution in the ocean,

See It, Change It

Owning Up to Oil: Trinidad and Tobago

November 12, 2020/in Fishing, Offshore, Offshore Drilling, Oil Spill /by Sasha Bylsma

Oil spills off Trinidad indicate chronic problems with infrastructure.

Although many people might not realize it, the small two-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago located off Venezuela’s east coast has been involved in the fossil fuel industry for over a century. While recent media attention has focused on a listing tanker off the coast of Trinidad, SkyTruth analysis of satellite imagery reveals that oil slicks around offshore oil and gas infrastructure throughout the region is common, threatening local fisheries, fishermen, and ecosystems.

Archive for category: Oil Spill

Satellite technology has changed but SkyTruth remains true to its core principles, with an impressive track record of holding industries and governments accountable.

With the intense concentration of polluters and frequent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the watchdog group Healthy Gulf relies on Alerts to flag dangerous incidents.

SkyTruth Alerts is our go-to tool for monitoring and investigating incidents like the Huntington Beach Oil Spill.

SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door.

Oil spills off Trinidad indicate chronic problems with infrastructure.