Thousands of oil spills have been recorded over the years, releasing large volumes of oil into marine ecosystems and causing lasting damage to biodiversity, fisheries, tourism and coastal economies. While major incidents attract attention, smaller fuel leakages and uncontrolled discharges, including diesel and similar pollutants, can be just as harmful when they go unnoticed.
At the same time, although facing fragile growth, rising costs and uncertainty, maritime transport remains central to global trade, making reliable monitoring and early detection more important than ever. As shipping activity continues to shape global commerce, improving the speed and accuracy of marine pollution detection is becoming an increasingly urgent priority.
It also reinforces the importance of frameworks such as the MARPOL Convention, which set the global standard for preventing pollution from ships.
Figure 1. Left: raw satellite image of the Odessa region, Ukraine. Middle: Coastal Intelligence operational interface output. Right: detected oil spill extent (red) on top of the river plume (green) — output for the client.
Why Fuel Spills Still Go Undetected
One of the biggest challenges is to detect not crude oil, but more volatile oil derivatives and fuel spill and leakage detection.
Moreover, not every suspicious patch on the sea surface equals pollution. Remote sensing operators must distinguish real discharges from naturally occurring phenomena that can look very similar in satellite imagery. These include biogenic slicks, low-wind areas, rainfall zones, internal waves and the leeward sides of islands.
That is exactly where advanced analytics becomes essential. SeaCras developed Coastal Intelligence, a tool that detects fuel spills with the combination of synthetic aperture radar and optical sensors, and different spatial resolutions of sensors. Coastal Intelligence utilises a series of additional atmospheric and marine data (often called auxiliary data) on a data fusion principle. This is a new methodology of deep learning that increases precision and detection rate of pollution incidents by reducing false positives in complex coastal environments.
Figure 2. Satellite-derived view of the incident in Hvar coastal region, showing the detected thin diesel leakage pollution intensity over the affected area, with warmer colors indicating higher surface concentrations of oil derivatives and the red outline marking the highlighted area of high pollution intensity area.
How Coastal Intelligence Improves Marine Pollution Monitoring
Coastal Intelligence combines proprietary satellite imagery processing modules with an innovative data analysis approach to deliver more accurate results. The system achieves the best known commercial spill detection success rate, including for patches measuring only a few hundred square metres. By using different satellite technologies and different sources, SeaCras delivers operational services more frequently.
Our platform uses high- and very-high-resolution optical satellite data, enabling more precise monitoring even in smaller areas such as ports and marinas.
But its value goes beyond identifying oil-derived pollution. Coastal Intelligence also helps users distinguish between manmade pollution events, uncontrolled sewage discharges near port areas, and natural phenomena such as algal blooms. By combining satellite-derived water quality parameters, satellite images, and sea current vector field maps, the project’s partners have strengthened both their detection and identification capabilities.
This makes Coastal Intelligence especially relevant as a complementary solution to the European Maritime Safety Agency’s CleanSeaNet service, which supports participating states with satellite-based oil spill and vessel detection across Europe.
Figure 3. Satellite-derived view of the diesel spill in Baniyas coastal region, Syria. Left: very high spatial resolution analysis of the oil pollution showing the thin areas and small patches of pollution migration. Right: regional view of the catastrophe, showing the higher pollution levels depicted by warmer colors.
A Scalable Solution for Ports and Maritime Authorities
SeaCras has translated this scientific excellence and technical capability into a commercially available operational service. Today, Coastal Intelligence serves port operators and maritime authorities across the globe, which is an immense achievement, considering it was developed initially only for the Adriatic and Ionian regions.
Its added value lies in wide-area coverage, frequent and affordable monitoring as well as alert-based response support.
In practice, that means giving ports, authorities and coastal stakeholders a stronger chance to detect pollution early, respond faster and better protect the seas they depend on.
Other Marine Pollution Hazards and Unexpected Natural Events
Oil and fuel pollution are just a tip of the iceberg of a much broader range of marine and maritime threats. Floating marine litter, plastic pollution are some of the world’s largest problems, while climate change and warming of our oceans increase the occurrences of harmful and abnormal algal blooms.
Check out how Coastal Intelligence tackles those cases as well!