Marine Oil Spill Monitoring using Sentinel-1 Dual-Pol SAR Data: An Operational GEE Framework
Journal
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters
ISSN
1545-598X
1558-0571
Date Issued
2026
Abstract
Oil Spills (OS) pose serious hazards to economies relying on the sea. Remote sensing facilitates effective offshore OS monitoring. As a result, the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions regularly deliver open-source cloud-stored data through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. This paper proposed an interactive GEE framework for operational use with Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) Dual-pol SAR data. An Eigen descriptor is developed to examine multiple OS incidents in GEE, and two OS from Cyprus are described in detail. OS signatures extracted from Single Look Complex (SLC) SAR and GRD are compared with the baseline Random Forest (RF) algorithm. Also, OS delineation results are showcased for the three SAR scenes reported in the literature. Qualitative outcomes show effectiveness for the GEE-based framework, whereas quantitative results are outstanding. Collectively, the proposed technique achieved an mIoU of 96%, a recall of 99%, an F1-score of 99% and accuracy of 98%. The novelty of the developed technique is an operational value of the GEE platform for Near-Real-Time (NRT) OS monitoring and actionable remote marine environment safety using SAR images as a “Black-box”.
Funding
The authors acknowledge support from the “ERATOSTHENES: Excellence Research Centre for Earth Surveillance
and Space-Based Monitoring of the Environment,” through the
EXCELSIOR project (www.excelsior2020.eu), funded by the
Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate
General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development, and the Cyprus University of Technology.
and Space-Based Monitoring of the Environment,” through the
EXCELSIOR project (www.excelsior2020.eu), funded by the
Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate
General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development, and the Cyprus University of Technology.
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