Examples of SAR Imagery Applications to the Petroleum Industry

Remote sensing is now widely used thanks to recent easy access software or database such as Google Earth or Bing (Microsoft). All those tools allow users to get a direct access to visualise spatial imagery but as a consequence it also hides a part of it, named Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing. Need for a geologist, a geophysicist, a petroleum engineer, a production engineer is drastically different requiring different data, tools and methodologies which can’t be always satisfied with only an optical imagery approach. SAR imagery is a powerful tool and a cost effective solution very well adapted worldwide including equatorial and arctic areas. Recent SAR imagery advantages are numerous: night and day capability, cloud free data, archives, polarimetric properties, high spatial and temporal resolutions. Valuable informations for the petroleum industry can be extracted such as dip quantification, polarisation parameters, multitemporal analyses, offshore spill and seep detection and mapping.