NASA Tests New Oil Spill Detection Equipment During Live Drill Off Norway

Scientists from NASA joined in on Norway’s annual oil spill cleanup train within the North Sea this 12 months to check out some new oil detection gear that might considerably assist cleanup within the case of a serious spill.

During the train held this month, NASA outfitted one among its analysis plane with a specialised Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, to observe the discharge of oil into the ocean, testing the radar’s potential to differentiate between extra and fewer damaging sorts of oil slicks.

Norway’s Oil on Water train has been held yearly because the Eighties and includes the managed launch of oil into the ocean, giving responders the possibility to observe with current cleanup strategies and gear and an opportunity to check new applied sciences.

The potential for the UAVSAR’s to categorise the oil in an oil slick was first noticed in the course of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill within the Gulf of Mexico. However, since officers solely had solely estimates of how a lot oil was being launched, researchers couldn’t absolutely examine UAVSAR’s accuracy.

“Radar has long been thought to be useful only for telling where oil is present,” mentioned Cathleen Jones, one of many three scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California invited to attend the train. “That information is important, but it’s not all that’s needed to direct the response to an oil spill.”

Because the identical accident can create each gentle sheens of oil a couple of hundredths of an inch thick and heavy, sticky emulsions of oil and seawater relying on components such because the climate and size of time because the spill, it will be important for responders to know what areas of a spill are of the best precedence.

“Thick emulsions hang around in the environment much longer than a sheen does,” Jones defined. “They’re more likely to make it to shore to contaminate coastal and tidal zones and to oil sea animals. If we can identify where that high-environmental-impact oil is, cleanup crews can get the most out of the time and people they have.”

NASA describes how the radar works:

Radars “see” an oil spill due to a attribute that the Greek thinker Aristotle first wrote about 2,500 years in the past: pouring oil on water smooths the floor. To an observer, returning radar indicators — referred to as backscatter — from a easy, oily sea floor look darker than backscatter from a traditional sea floor with small, bumpy waves.
During their observations of the Gulf oil spill, the NASA scientists found that the extraordinarily delicate UAVSAR may additionally detect one other attribute of oil: in contrast with seawater, it’s a very poor conductor of electrical energy. Radar waves are mirrored nicely by supplies with good electrical conductivity, similar to seawater, and never so nicely by poor conductors like oil. For that motive, the power of the backscatter from totally different components of an oil slick is said to the thickness of the emulsion in every half.

In order to calibrate the UAVSAR information, the Norwegian train launched emulsions of differing thicknesses in order that the scientists may have a spread of circumstances to work off of. The experiment additionally examined the instrument’s potential to differentiate between petroleum and plant-based oil, present in algal blooms. “In the Baltic Sea you will see plenty of these, and they look like oil slicks from [radar on] a satellite,” commented Camilla Brekke, affiliate professor within the Department of Physics and Technology on the University of Tromsø, Norway.

NASA notes that Norway is one of some nations worldwide that enables oil to be discharged at sea to check new cleanup applied sciences and procedures. This 12 months, Oil on Water was held on the deserted Frigg Oilfield, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northwest of Stavanger, Norway.