Practical Applications of Remote Sensing
Authors: Fillippone Walter R. 
Published: December 2007

Distinguished Author Series articles are general, descriptive representations that summarize the state of the art in an area of technology bydescribing recent developments for readers who are not specialists in thetopics discussed. Written by individuals recognized as experts in the area, these articles provide key references to more definitive work and presentspecific details only to illustrate the technology. Purpose: to informthe general readership of recent advances in various areas of petroleumengineering.

Though remote sensing has been available in many forms for decades, it became much more available and interesting with the advent of the EarthResources Technology Satellite-1 (ERTS-1), later renamed LANDSAT-1, in 1972. Since that time, hundreds of thousands of images detected by satellites havebeen transmitted to base stations at strategic locations around the world andrecorded in digital format for further processing. These data have been madeavailable to the entire free world for agricultural purposes. The large areascovered by each image and the repeatability of the images on subsequent passeshave made them useful additionally in navigation, engineering studies of icefloes and harbors, studies of sedimentary deposition near river deltas, and theinterpretation of geologic features too large to visualize on conventionalaerial photographs. This paper highlights applications of readily available, remotely sensed data without the need for more sophisticated processing. Itpoints out some techniques used to interpret events on the imagery that relateto subsurface features that are important in the exploration and development ofoil and gas fields and makes use of analogies to known geologic features. The Appendix lists the current sources of the various remotely sensed data.

Introduction

Remote sensing of the environment and the earth has been in use for manyyears. Airborne instrumentation for photography that uses special films, radiation detection, magnetic and electromagnetic measurements, and radar are afew examples. Each has been used successfully in exploration for oil, gas, andminerals. Surveys have been made with infrared (IR) film for thermal radiationdetection of the earth's surface to locate geothermal sources and some mineralsassociated with recent vulcanism. These IR surveys, conducted at night fromlow-flying aircraft, were particularly hazardous and not very useful because ofturbulence and poor navigation. With the addition of radar instrumentation, thesurveys were much safer and were more accurately assembled into useful, carefully registered strip maps. Aeromagnetic surveys were flown over most ofthe basins of the world to provide reconnaissance maps. Simultaneous aerialphotography tied the magnetic data to landmarks to make maps that could be usedto locate magnetic minerals or minerals associated with magnetic rocks. Thesesurveys also were used to calculate depth-to-basement maps that provided goodframework maps of the basin shape, basement faults, and basement topographicstructures related to anticlines and synclines in the overlying sediments. Electromagnetic surveys have been used extensively for the detection of thesulfide minerals, which tend to be more conductive than the host rocks and mostsediments. Sidescan radar has been in use for many years to provide imagery ofthe surface and to find structures related to the topography.

JPT

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