Use of SIR-C/X-SAR to monitor environmental damages of the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait

During the war that engulfed Kuwait in 1991, over 50% of Kuwait´s desert surface was disturbed by large-scale troop movements and clean-up operations. Iraqi forces detonated explosives laid at all 810 active oil wells, setting 656 wells ablaze while 74 others gushed oil uncontrollably from the well heads. The free-flowing oil accumulated into a network of rivers and approximately 300 oil lakes covering an area of more than 49 sq. km. Approximately 21 million barrels of oil was recovered but 1 million barrels of unrecoverable oil was left in the oil fields. Since then some of the oil had either evaporated, flowed beneath sand cover or been covered by aeolian deposits and is no longer visible at the surface. Since 1991, Kuwait has been imaged a number of times by orbital SAR systems including ERS-1, JERS-1 and SIR-C/X-SAR since 1991. SIR-C/X-SAR imaged the southeastern portion of Kuwait during both SRL-1 (April 13, 1994) and SRL-2 (October 4, 1994) in a non-polarimetric mode (hh- and hv-polarizations at Land C-bands). Both scenes cover southeast Kuwait including parts of Kuwait City; Greater Burgan, Wafra and Umm Gudair oil fields. False color composites of the SIR-C/X-SAR data reveal a number features related to the environmental devastation wrought by the Gulf War. Of particular note are the buried oil lakes which are readily detected and mapped using the spectral gradient of hh-polarized backscatter (L_hh/C_hh). Knowledge of the location and extent of these bodies are of great importance to resource recovery and environmental remediation efforts