Estimating surface oil extent from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill using ASCAT backscatter

The damping effects of oil on capillary ocean waves alter the backscattered power of radar measurements made by remote-sensing instruments such as scatterometers. Numerically computed vector winds are input to a wind geophysical model function (GMF) to determine the expected backscatter from the ocean surface uncontaminated by surface oil. Large differences between expected backscatter and observed backscatter indicate areas of the ocean surface affected by oil. The recent oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico provides a spatial extent large enough to be tracked by the ASCAT scatterometer. In this paper we use ASCAT data and numerically predicted winds to estimate the spatial extent of surface oil.