Patent ID: 8395119

Claim:
An airborne/spaceborne oil spill determination system for detecting oil spills and other contaminants on a water surface, such systems comprising: a moderate resolution imaging spectrometer providing high radiometric sensitivity in two spectral bands L 1 and L 2 ranging in wavelength from 0.4 μm to 14.4 μm and wherein one of the bands is within the near infrared range and the other of the bands is outside of the near infrared range; an initialization controller for synchronizing the system operation and inputting cloud and land masks signals; a pair of enabling/disabling gates for receiving data from bands L 1 and L 2 for simultaneously disabling at both bands processing data over areas where cloud and land masks exists; said enable/disable gates enable band data to be processed further when cloudless conditions or the non existence of land exists; a pair of extreme value units for calculating the respective extreme values exceeding a programmed threshold from the data flow from L 1 and L 2 ; an absolute value calculator, a classification table and a warning indicator; a pair of delay circuits for inputting a delay value “dl” that is defined by said initialization controller; and a pair of division members for generating values of bands L 1 and L 2 for the extreme enabling values respectively and for feeding signals to said absolute value calculator; and wherein said absolute value calculator calculates the incompatibility/difference value which represents the different behavior of bands L 1 and L 2 over a water surface contaminated by oil or other surface contaminant and the spectral ratio values after the absolute value calculated are [(L max2 /L max1 −L min2 /L min1 )] wherein L max1 and L min1 are the maximum and minimum spectral radiance values at 649 nm, corresponding to MODIS band 1 of the 250 m bands. L max2 and L min2 are the maximum and minimum spectral radiance values at 869 nm, corresponding to MODIS band 2 of the 250 m bands; whereby said classification table produces a warning “W” based on the programmed classes from the classification value (va) inputted by said utilization controller.