Satellite monitoring of the Black Sea surface pollution

The results of a long-term satellite monitoring of the Black Sea revealing sea surface pollution by oil as well as manifestations of biogenic and anthropogenic surface films are presented. The basic data are high-resolution radar images obtained by synthetic aperture radars onboard Envisat satellite (till the spring of 2012) and onboard Sentinel-1 satellite (starting from October, 2014). A large amount of experimental data provides statistically significant results on spatial and temporal distributions of these surface films on the sea surface. The regions of the heaviest pollution are outlined. Our findings suggest that certain types of surface pollution detected in sea surface radar imagery are caused by natural hydrocarbon seeps at the Black Sea bottom.