GOM TRACS: Oil Slick Thickness and Coverage from Remote Sensing, 2016-2018

2016-2018 field research data from the MC20 chronic oil discharge site in the Gulf of Mexico. The dataset was collected by NOAA as part of the Deepwater Horizon Lessons Learned Studies to develop methods for estimating oil slick coverage and thickness. It includes synoptic satellite imagery, airborne imagery, surface oil characterization, and subsurface oil slick data.

Use Cases

• Training machine learning models for oil slick detection based on satellite and airborne imagery mentioned in the description.
• Developing algorithms to estimate oil thickness and emulsion mixtures based on remote sensing data.
• Analyzing the spatial and temporal patterns of a chronic oil discharge based on multi-year field surveys.
• Calibrating remote sensing platforms using in-situ surface and subsurface oil characterization data.

Strengths

• Data is part of a formal NOAA study funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior and BSEE.
• Covers a multi-year period (2016, 2017, and 2018) at a known chronic discharge site (MC20).
• Integrates multiple data collection methods: satellite, airborne, surface, and subsurface.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is delivered in PDF and HTML formats, which may require extraction for analysis.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Commerce.

Collection Method

Field research involving synoptic collection of satellite imagery, airborne imagery, surface oil characterization, and subsurface oil slick data.

Time Range

2016-2018

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 22:22:30.178148; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Mississippi Canyon lease block #20 (MC20) in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, North America.