Seabird

Oil Spill Monitoring

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An aerial view of an oil spill in water


Oil is an important part of the modern world. With the extraction of oil, comes the requirement for monitoring environmental impacts of oil spills and leaking active and closed offshore wells. Monitoring is crucial to understanding the long-term changes and developing appropriate remediation methods.

Sea-Bird manufactures oil detection sensors as well as CTD systems that can be deployed and integrated on systems for oil spill monitoring:

Oil Detection Systems

Sea-Bird Scientific’s SeaOWL UV-ATM is an in-situ oil-in-water sensor. Based-on the highly successful Sea-Bird Scientific ECO sensor, the SeaOWL UV-ATM is an industry-leading oil-detection technology with 5X optical resolution improvement over its predecessor. A variation of the SeaOWL, the SeaOWL UV-ATM SLC, is specifically designed for integration into the Teledyne Webb Research Slocom glider.

CTD Systems

Sea-Bird CTD systems are ideally suited for this monitoring work, as the oil will not cause long-term damage to the CTD. Note that if the oil coats the inside of the conductivity cell and dissolved oxygen sensor membrane, it can possibly affect the sensor's calibration (and thus affect the measurement and the data).

A large number of Sea-Bird instruments/equipment are suitable for integration with biogeochemical sensors:

Case Studies