SIMP: SLICKS AS INDICATORS FOR MARINE PROCESSES

SIMP is an international project funded by INTAS aimed at improving the information content, which can be inferred from multi-sensor satellite imagery of marine coastal areas. Scientific teams from Germany, UK, Portugal, and Russia focus on the development of novel tools for marine remote sensing of the coastal zone. In particular, the project teams' benefit from the fact that surface films may enhance the signatures of hydrodynamic processes such as plumes, internal waves, eddies, etc., on microwave, optical, and infrared imagery. The project's objectives are to develop a robust methodology for identifying slick-related phenomena/processes through their surface signatures and thereby, to improve the discrimination capabilities between slicks and other oceanic and atmospheric phenomena by taking into account information gained from satellite imagery quasi-simultaneously recorded at microwave, visible and IR wavelengths. The results of the two project years are summarized. Examples are given for the project’s web presentation, laboratory and field experiments, and of the analyses of various satellite data.