Geosensing systems engineering for ocean security and sustainable coastal zone management

Three major threats to ocean security and coastal zone sustainability - global warming, the loss of ocean biodiversity, and pollution - are combining to threaten the ecological integrity of our marine environment and life support systems. We put forward a geomatics-based systems engineering architecture to identify the location and extent of oil spills, thereby improving the ecological integrity of the world’s oceans and helping contingency planners to determine required assets, personnel and other resources. This real-time, event-based and cost effective emergency management decision support system can aid in the classification, detection, and monitoring of oil spills in the marine environment. The developed Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) processing and calibration techniques efficiently monitor environmental changes in inaccessible ocean regions, characterize oil spill scenarios, and help to identify spill sources. The system is used to improve emergency management in the Gulf of Mexico, with application to oil spills arising from Hurricane Katrina.