Feasibility of Oil Slick Detection Using BeiDou-R Coastal Simulation

Oil spills, which can cause severe immediate and long-term harm to marine ecological environments for decades after the initial accident, require rapid and accurate monitoring. Currently, optical and radar satellite images are used to monitor oil spills; however, remote sensing generally needs a long revisit period. Global Navigation Satellite System reflected signals (GNSS-R) can provide all-weather and all-day ocean monitoring and is therefore more suitable for oil spill monitoring. To assess the feasibility of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System reflected signals (BeiDou-R) in detecting oil slicks, a BeiDou-R coastal simulated experiment is performed in this study on the oil slick distribution of an oil pipeline explosion accident. We set up an observation point and selected observation satellites, and a delay-Doppler map (DDM) of an oil-slicked sea surface under coastal scenarios was created by combining the mean-square slope (MSS) model for oil-slicked/clean surfaces and the Zavorotny–Voronovich (Z–V) scattering model. DDM simulation of the coastal scenarios effectively represents the scattering coefficient distribution of the presence of an oil slick. Theoretical analysis revealed that oil slicks can be detected within a radius of less than 5 km around the specular reflection point (SP) for BeiDou-R coastal simulation.