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The coastline of India is about 7500 km long where numerous major and minor ports are situated alongside the Indian Coast where crude oil is handled with other cargo due to which heavy traffic has been observed on these ports and therefore the occurrence of oil spills due to leakages or illegal discharges from ships in the offshore regions of West Coast of India (WCI) and East Coast of India (ECI) cannot be ignored. The present study deals with the oil pollution that has occurred through various sources in the WCI and ECI using remote sensing (RS) technique. A total of 562 available images were downloaded from sentinel-1sensor with band width SAR-C for the year of 2019 all along the coast of India. Using a rule based image processing methodology out of 562 images, 173 images were found to contain 498 oil spills in the study area. It was found that oil spills in 2019 were more recurrent in offshore of Gujarat (53%) followed by Mumbai (44%) and Kerala (3%). The source of spills detected off Gujarat and Kerala were identified to be from ships and off Mumbai coast was identified to be from both ships and oil fields. Similarly, for ECI the total quantity of oil identified off coast from Kolkata (88%) and Vishakhapatnam (12%) was 942.66879 L. Broadly, 61% of the total quantity of oil in the study region was found to be in the WCI and 39% in ECI. This study mainly reveals the ship transportation is contributing more to oil pollution followed by off shore oil fields.
Keywords: Marine Pollution, Oil Spill, Sentinel-1, Ocean Remote Sensing,
