Oil-spill monitoring detects surface oil, maps slick extent, screens look-alike features, and cues incident response or enforcement from SAR backscatter, optical context, and maritime evidence.^[1]^[2]^[3] Synthetic Aperture Radar is the main satellite sensor for oil spill detection because it can observe slick-related sea-surface roughness changes.^[1] Sentinel-1 imagery can detect oil-spill signatures and supports marine slick mapping.^[2] Satellite SAR is an operational tool for oil-spill monitoring and assessment, while multi-sensor data can support thickness classification.^[3]

What's available today

2 data products and 24 sensors. Start with the most-used; switch to Filter for the full catalogue.

2 Data products

0 Services

24 Sensors

1 open 1 commercial

Data products

Comm. ICEYE Maritime Monitoring

Open Sentinel-1 GRD IW

Advanced Baseline Imager GOES-16

Advanced Himawari Imager Himawari-9

Copernicus EMS On Demand Mapping —

COSI (Corea SAR Instrument) KOMPSAT-5

COSMIC-EYE Area Monitoring —

COSMIC-EYE Infrastructure Monitoring —

ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station) ECOSTRESS ISS deployment

Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) Meteosat-12

FY-4A Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager FY-4A

FY-4B Advanced Geostationary Radiation Imager FY-4B

Infrared Multispectral Scanner - 2 Huan Jing-2A

MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Terra

MONITORED AI —

MSU-GS Electro-L Imager Electro-L N4

MSU-IK-SR Kanopus-V

MSU-MR VIS/IR Imaging Radiometer Meteor-M N2-4

SAR-C (EOS-04) EOS-04

SAR-X (RISAT-2 series) RISAT-2BR1

SARah active phased-array SAR SARah

SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) Sentinel-3A

Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager Meteosat-10

StriX SAR Synspective StriX

TerraSAR-X SAR TerraSAR-X

Verde —

Sources

[1]ESA Sentinel-1 oil spill detected image noteagency doc-2026-05-27
[2]ESA Knowledge Hub oil spill monitoring training resourceagency doc-2026-05-27
[3]USGS multi-sensor oil spill thickness classification publicationpeer reviewed2018-01-012026-05-27
[4]NASA-ISRO NISAR oil and chemical spills application noteagency doc-2026-05-27

How to cite this page

Plain text

Oil spills. EO-Atlas, SpectraWorks B.V., last reviewed 2026-05-27. https://eo-atlas.org/topics/oil-spill (CC BY 4.0)

BibTeX

@misc{eoatlas:topics:oil-spill,
  title = {Oil spills},
  author = {{EO-Atlas}},
  publisher = {SpectraWorks B.V.},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Last reviewed 2026-05-27. CC BY 4.0},
  url = {https://eo-atlas.org/topics/oil-spill}
}