Marine petroleum affects the environment, economy, and quality of life of coastal inhabitants leading to concerns that include resource exploitation, recovery, transportation, and resultant oil…

Marine petroleum affects the environment, economy, and quality of life of coastal inhabitants leading to concerns that include resource exploitation, recovery, transportation, and resultant oil spill contingency planning, mitigation, and remediation jensen 1990. Oil spills threaten ecological and economic catastrophe requiring the best available technology to mitigate damage and monitor ecological recovery and adaptation. Remote sensing can survey areas that are vast and inaccessible and provides repeatable standardized data for interpretation, including automated space based detection of spills that have not yet been reported fingas and brown, 1997. The unprecedented deepwater horizon DWH oil spill demonstrated a range of new remote sensing technologies that were used to aid the spill response however their implementation was haphazard leifer 2012. When in DWH, the unfolding disasters scale expands beyond the limits of human vision remote sensing can play an important role leifer 2012 macdonald 2015. Still, while numerous studies have shown advantages for oil spill remote sensing leifer 2012 and citations therein, the operational application potential remains largely untapped. Critical challenges to remote sensing acceptance for operational use relate to factors including accessibility, reliability confidence, task ability, and interoperability. These issues encompass data products and their format, metadata availability, timeliness, and validation. Existing gaps in these aspects and challenges impede the integration of remote sensing data into operational oil spill response. Thus, IT is critically important to ensure remote sensing products meet responder needs, address critical response problems and provide rapid response decision making. Given that decisions have long term career, health, economic, and ecological implications, confidence in the validity and utility of the remote sensing products is critical leifer 2015. This proposal supports a workshop to address gaps in the incorporation of remote sensing into oil spill responder operational decisionmaking. As has been noted, new technology incorporation is highly challenging at best, and typically impossible during an oil spill response. Thus remote sensing needs to be stovepiped into different agencies oil spill response plans particularly to ensure ancillary and critical validation data are collected. What generally is missing is a dialogue between providers of remote sensing data and data products and end users in the operational response community and other stakeholders. Oil spires will address a number of spill scenarios arctic, seattle mid latitude, cloudy, tropical oil spill, etc., for different oil types, one scenario per breakout group. Each breakout group will include both spill response agency representatives and remote sensing scientists and enablers with the goal to facilitate a discussion between these disparate groups. Each breakout group will develop respective comprehensive remote sensing oil spill response plans. These remote sensing oil spill plans will describe the needed data remote sensing, ancillary, and validation and its specifications, as well as identifying key logistical challenges including bureaucratic. Although the breakout session plans will be developed for immediate application, they are initial plans to disseminate to the community for feedback. Oil spires also will summarize data archiving of both remote sensing and critical ancillary supporting data. Outcomes include a white paper of the remote sensing plans and also new technology recommendations to better address remote sensing oil spill response. The white paper will be adapted for submission to EOS or similar venue to better engage the broader community.