Technical Description and Simulation Experiments for Oil Fingerprinting and Water Column Characterization

Within the panel of sensors used for monitoring the oil pollution at sea, the lidar fluorosensors are the instruments which can give an information on the nature of the product present in a slick. This information results from an analysis of the laser induced fluorescence characteristics. If appropriately processed, the information provided by a “classical lidar” (using a restricted number of spectral channels) allows to distinguish between classes of products such as biogenic oils, lubrication oils, fuels, crude oils, etc...[1]. A refined identification requires more data; several approaches are possible: high spectral resolution [2], multiple excitation wavelength [3] or time resolution [4]. This last technique was particularly studied at the Joint Research Center and led to the concept of a high temporal resolution (1 ns) lidar system to classify the various types of crude oils on the basis of their fluorescence emission spectrum and decay times.