Oliktok Point, AK Field Tests - Imagery

NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration lead a multi-agency research team including the Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC), students from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and scientists from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the United States Coast Guard (USCG) designed experiments to evaluate the capabilities of various technologies such as multispectral and thermal sensors, to characterize oil in ice environments. This information is used to help responders understand the particular strengths of different technologies to characterize oil in broken ice environments.

This project involved 2 separate experiments which were conducted on near the shore of the Beaufort Sea in Alaska at the DOE testing facility at Oliktok Point and at the Kuparuk River between May 31st and June 6th and aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Cutter Sir Wilfrid Laurier between July 25th - 28th, 2022. The findings of these studies will be used to support spill response and assessment activities in open water ice environments throughout the navigable waters of the US.

The goal of these studies is to improve the understanding of the capacity of different sensors to detect oil at different thicknesses in ice conditions. Data will be collected from UAS platforms using multiple sensors (visual, multispectral, thermal) over small totes and broken sea ice offshore of the facility as well as in the open waters of the Beaufort Sea to facilitate identification and characterization of oil and ice features. The products generated will be orthomosaic maps of the broken ice related characterizations of this ice showing how the targets are identified from the UAS at different altitudes.

This 'RGB' orthomosaic file is used as an input for the Ice Characterization process created by Water Mapping, LLC proprietary software.

This orthomosaic was created to improve thermal and multispectral sensor capacity to detect and characterize surface oil in broken ice conditions while using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The orthomosaic is compiled by including hundreds of independent images collected by the UAS. The ground pixel resolution for this orthomosaic is approximately 2.5x2.5cm per pixel.