RADARSAT-2 Imagery now available

RADARSAT-2, Canada's new commercial SAR satellite, was launched in December 2007 on a Soyuz vehicle from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Operating in C-band, the RADARSAT-2 ensures continuity of all existing RADARSAT-1 modes.

RADARSAT-2 technical enhancements provide improved capabilities for mapping. These enhancements include high-resolution 3-meter data and multi-polarization, which improve the discrimination and recognition of surface features and targets. In addition, greater positional information and control over the RADARSAT-2 orbit garners higher absolute accuracies of end products (eg. InSAR and DEMs).

For environmental concerns, RADARSAT-2 will provide marine surveillance, from tracking commercial fishing activities to monitoring oil spill occurrences as well as improved land cover mapping, particularly in grasslands and forests.

RADARSAT-2 Successfully Launched

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. announced the successful launch of RADARSAT-2, Canada’s commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite. The satellite was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan December 17 at ~ 05:17 Pacific Standard Time on a Soyuz launch vehicle. Check out the launch video.

In addition to providing data continuity for RADARSAT-1, RADARSAT-2 is also supposed to improve data repeatability, and data quality for applications such as environmental monitoring, ice mapping, resource mapping, disaster management and marine surveillance.

SkyTruth has used RADARSAT data in documenting oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina as well as the Cosco Busan oil spil in the San Francisco Bay. It's also an indispensible tool for detecting and monitoring the locations of vessels at sea: we're currently assessing the feasibility of using satellite images to monitor vessel activity in the Papahānaumokuākea (Northwest Hawaiian Islands) Marine National Monument, with support from the Campbell Foundation. We look forward to many more years of using RADARSAT to monitor our coastal waterways!

San Francisco Bay's Sneaky Bridges Strike Again!

Another of those treacherous San Francisco Bay bridges - this time the nefarious Richmond-San Rafael bridge - apparently jumped out in the path of a barge carrying nearly 65,000 barrels (2.7 MILLION gallons) of heavy oil last night. The Coast Guard reports that none of the oil has been spilled, although the barge was damaged on the starboard bow and the hull may have been breached. Check out the story by KRON Channel 4 and their video news conference with the Coast Guard.

(Generic tug-and-barge pic purely for illustration - courtesy of this excellent image gallery)

Coming so soon after the Cosco Busan fuel-oil spill in the Bay, this is a vivid reminder that accidents will happen. In this case (so far at least) the folks in San Francisco have gotten lucky and the Coast Guard response was timely. I hope the folks living around Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and other busy port areas in confined estuaries are paying close attention and keeping on their toes - it's only a matter of time before spills occur, and as the Cosco Busan incident illustrated, immediate effective response is necessary to prevent costly damage to both local economies and natural resources.

Oil Spill Season

Wow, what the heck is goin' on in our oceans?

This has been an awful two months for oil spills, starting in late October with the Pemex oil platform accident and continuing crude-oil spill in the southern Gulf of Mexico; a huge oil tanker spill in the Black Sea; the comparatively small, yet still quite damaging, Cosco Busan fuel-oil spill in San Francisco Bay; a major spill, the worst ever in South Korea, that's destroyed shellfishing grounds and coated beaches; and now, a 1-million-plus-gallon crude-oil spill by Statoil, the state oil company of Norway, in the North Sea.

Cumulatively these spills represent more than 6 million gallons of oil. What a mess. As a California state official noted, the ecological effects of these spills continues for years, even decades, long after our attention has drifted elsewhere...

Hurricane Katrina - Gulf of Mexico Oil Spills

Speaking of oil spills, SkyTruth images revealed significant spills covering a large area of the northern Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. At the time, nobody was talking about what had happened to the 4,000 offshore oil platforms - and 34,000 miles of pipeline on the seafloor - when Katrina ripped through the Gulf as a Cat 5 storm, followed a few weeks later by Hurricane Rita. Attention was rightly focused on the unfolding human tragedy, as well as the 7-9 million gallons of oil spilled from damaged pipelines, refineries and storage tanks onshore.

But for months after the storms, officials from government and industry repeatedly claimed that there were no "significant" spills in the Gulf. That line is still heard even now. Yet in May 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service published their offshore damage assessment: 113 platforms totally destroyed, and - more importantly - 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10" or larger diameter. At least 741,000 gallons were spilled from 124 reported sources (the Coast Guard calls anything over 100,000 gallons a "major" spill).

Wells and platforms were shut down before the storm, so leakage from those facilities was minimal. Pipelines were shut down too. But what the officials failed to mention is they don't require industry to "purge" pipelines before a severe storm - so they were probably still loaded with oil, gas or liquid gas condensate. Any section of pipeline that was breached leaked all of that product into the Gulf within hours of the storm. That's what we think accounts for the widespread slicks seen on the imagery from September 1 and 2, covering hundreds of square miles and obviously emanating from many points of origin. These slicks dispersed after several days of high winds offshore, as shown by our followup imagery taken on September 12, but a few problems remained as evidenced by ongoing leaks from wrecked platforms.

This report from MMS details the pipeline damage that occurred.

San Francisco Bay - Cosco Busan Oil Spill

On November 7 a transoceanic container ship called the Cosco Busan hit one of the supports for the SF - Oakland Bay Bridge, tearing a big gash in the side of the vessel and spilling 58,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil into the Bay. At first the Coast Guard seriously underestimated the size of the spill, and it took a couple of hours before containment and cleanup crews were on the scene. By then the oil had spread, and over the following week it traveled throughout much of the Bay and even out into the Pacific Ocean, washing up on beaches over a wide area.

We had a radar imaging satellite (named, appropriately enough, "Radarsat") take a picture as it orbited over the San Francisco Bay five days later. Defenders of Wildlife and Ocean Conservancy helped pay for the image, which showed numerous slicks in the Bay and beyond the Golden Gate. Check out our gallery and the press release from Ocean Conservancy.

For you Google Earth users (and there are more of you every day!), we also produced this KMZ file. The story told by the imagery is summed up well by Warner Chabot at Ocean Conservancy: "...containing the oil in the first two hours is 100 times more important than chasing it all over the San Francisco Bay for the next two weeks." Two Bay-area stations used our images in their November 20 broadcasts - CBS 5 news at noon (watch the story), and ABC 7 news at 5pm.