A study on the use of SAR polarimetric data to observe oil spills

In this paper a new procedure to discriminate different surface films by means of SAR polarimetric data is proposed. SAR data were acquired on October 11, 1994 during SIR-C/X-SAR mission, named SRL-2. The dark features characterizing different surface films are analysed using eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the coherence matrix. Results of this study give rise to the conclusions that SAR polarimetric data are a key tool to discriminate oil spills from biogenic/anthropogenic surface films to reduce the number of false alarms.