Identification of crude oil and emulsified crude oil based on microwave scattering experiment

The leaked of crude oil will form emulsions of different concentrations in the process of weathering and migration, which poses a serious threat to the marine ecological environment. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) plays a major role in the observation of the extent of oil spills on the sea surface which is not affected by rain and clouds and has the advantage of day and night monitoring. However, there are some deficiencies in the identification of emulsified crude oil still exist. In this paper, the natural emulsification of crude oil was observed by C-band full-polarization microwave scatterometer, emulsification process of crude oil simulated by manually prepared oil samples with different moisture content was also observed to study the change of the normalized radar cross section (N_(RCS)). The experimental results show that N_(RCS) of emulsified crude oil is higher than that of crude oil, and the higher the emulsification degree is, the higher the N_(RCS) of oil film is. N_(RCS) differences between oil and water (△sigma~0) and damping ratio (D_R) can identify emulsified and non-emulsified crude oil, reflect the change of the degree of oil film emulsification, and in VV polarization is the best