PRIMI: A pilot project on marine oil pollution

The Pilot Project PRIMI, one of the seven initiatives started by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to support risk management activities, aims to provide information on oil marine pollution. The system, presently at half of its development cycle, consists of four components, two of them devoted to the analysis of SAR and Optical satellite images for the detection of slicks, an oil spill forecast subsystem and a central archive that provides Web-GIS services. A preliminary version of the system is already operational, while the final version will be ready by the end of 2009. Besides the slicks relevant information, the system is foreseen to provide also the meteorological and oceanographic information and the detected ships present on the scenes analysed. The architecture of the system, the operational scenario and the preliminary results are presented.