Case Study: Sea Empress – How the latest MarineAware tools could have helped
The availability of data and accurate modelling is crucial to forming a rapid and effective response in an emergency. MarineAware enables this in the world of marine pollution. Bringing together a range of capabilities, it provides more accessible and integral decision support to improv users’ preparedness to respond to potentially catastrophic oil spills at sea.
Through their collaboration with 4 Earth Intelligence (4EI), developers at Riskaware have incorporated Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) datasets into MarineAware. The ESIs that 4EI produce use automated satellite image classification methods aligned with international standards to rank the areas of coastline in terms of their sensitivity to marine pollution such as oil spills.
To demonstrate these integrated capabilities, we examine the Sea Empress oil spill which devastated large parts of the coastline of South Wales in 1996. Our latest case study revisits the Sea Empress spill with a new perspective, to determine how MarineAware’s prioritisation strategy could reduce the impact if a similar disaster occurred today.
