Real-time monitoring and forecasting oil spill around Aramco facilities in the Arabian Gulf

The objective of this scope is to develop and implement a fully-automated operational oil-spill monitoring and prediction system that detects in near real-time oil spills and forecasts its fate based on satellite imagery, environmental datasets, artificial intelligence, and advanced numerical atmospheric-oceanic modeling. The system will be implemented and demonstrated for one of Aramco’s operational areas recommended by the company; the northern Arabian Gulf was identified as the pilot monitoring area where most of the oil spills historically occurred. The system will operate with minimal human intervention and shall provide near-real time information about oil spilled and its fate. The system will also offer an interactive online mechanism to check and if needed, manually modify, the inferred oil spill information before triggering the trajectory prediction process. The system will be further enabled to interactively implement and visualize the oil fate according to various scenarios based on the projected confidence in the inferred oil spill parameters and environmental conditions.

The proposed project will develop a framework for operational oil spill monitoring and forecasting system, which includes

• Identify the best combination of satellite imageries to operationally monitor the pilot area
• Identify and secure required SAR images for successful continuous monitoring of the pilot area
• Develop the machinery for automatically downloading and post-processing the satellite images
• Develop and implement the oil spill detection and inference system
• Develop an interactive interface to check and modify the satellite detected oil spill patches
• Link the monitoring system to the operational weather-ocean system
• Develop the framework to automatically trigger the oil spill trajectory prediction once oil spill is identified
• Develop an advanced interactive visualization system for non-experts to stream in near real-time the forecast model outputs and for analysis
• Tune and validate the final system
• Provide a periodic inspection and maintenance for the system
• Manage the data and back it up accordingly
• Train Aramco personnel to be competent in utilizing the system and analyzing its outputs