The Investigation of Mysterious Marine Oil Spills on the West Coast of Canada

Abstract

The Government of Canada’s National Aerial Surveillance Program (NASP) is responsible for the monitoring of ship based oil pollution in Canada’s three oceans. In many of these spills, the source of pollution is unknown as there are often no vessels found in the vicinity at the time of detection. In this work, the oil spills found in 2010 on the West Coast of Canada, alongside the collated vessel traffic data captured by the Canadian Coast Guard are investigated to determine the vessels most likely responsible for these spills. In terms of tools and techniques applied, oil spills are firstly hindcasted using the General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME) to determine the location of their source. ArcGIS is used to geospatially reference and combine various data sets, and lastly the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to rank possible polluters found in the area of the spill.