Kuparuk River Oil-in-Ice Characterization Imagery from 2022 Field Tests

NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration led a multi-agency field experiment in May-June and July 2022 near the Beaufort Sea, Alaska, and aboard a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. The project evaluated multispectral and thermal sensor technologies for characterizing oil in broken ice environments. Findings are intended to support spill response and assessment in US navigable waters with ice.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking multispectral sensor performance for oil detection based on the described field tests in ice environments.
• Evaluating thermal imagery for oil characterization based on the technology assessment focus mentioned in the description.
• Informing spill response planning in Arctic waters based on the stated goal of supporting assessment activities in ice.
• Training machine learning models for oil-in-ice segmentation using the collected imagery data.

Strengths

• Data originates from a coordinated multi-agency effort involving NOAA, EPA, USCG, BSEE, and university participants.
• Experiments were conducted during two specific timeframes in 2022 at defined Arctic locations.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset scale are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The primary file format is PDF, which may not be directly machine-readable for analysis.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Collection Method

Field experiments using multispectral and thermal sensors conducted by a research team.

Time Range

May 31 - June 6, 2022 and July 25 - 28, 2022

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 13 22:22:21.565213; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Beaufort Sea, Alaska at Oliktok Point and Kuparuk River; aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Cutter Sir Wilfrid Laurier