News of Marine Surveillance in Cuba with SARx`technology from the E-GEOS_INSMET collaboration

Abstract

This article shows the contribution of the Italy-Cuba collaboration and technology transfer project: “Strengthening the Cuban marine meteorological system” (Marine Surveillance) in the application of SAR technology in the surveillance of the seas around Cuba from the acquisition of SAR images from the CosmoSky-MED satellite constellation for 9 months; and training for digital processing through the IT tools of the SEonSE platform. With these new tools, 2,550 SAR images were processed with the SeonSE Engine computer tool, with statistics of the vessels and oil slicks found in the same period using the SeonSE Portal software. During this period, a significant number of oil slicks were found in the seas surrounding Cuba, which evidenced the existence of inappropriate conduct of dumping of hydrocarbons into the sea, and the importance of monitoring these bad practices in the future to combat them. These new features constitute a new approach in marine surveillance and an impact on the early warning system for marine oil pollution, since the system is capable of detecting slicks and sending notification to end users.

Keywords

• marine surveillance
• SAR images
• CosmoSky-MED
• SeonSE