Monitoring of Oil Spill Using Ultra-Violet Laser

Abstract

We have developed the helicopter-based fluorescence imaging LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for the monitoring of oil spills. This is an active, remote sensing system which shoots a UV pulsed laser beam to an oil spill on the sea's surface, the fluorescence image is then observed. Compared to other techniques, this monitoring method has the merit of a high reliability of oil spill identification. And also high observability, even in nighttime, or rainfall and in high-wave conditions.
In the helicopter flight experiments, the detection and identification of sea water and light fuel oil has been successful. In addition, the area of light fuel oil film was estimated by the fluorescence 2-D image observations.
In this technical report, we describe the details of this system and the results of the performance evaluation so far and by experimentation using helicopters.