Prestige Marine Pollution: A GIS Tool

Abstract

The accident and sink of the tank ship Prestige, that occurred offshore of the Galicia coast (northwest Spain) on November 2002, caused a large oil spill with important ecological and economic consequences for the Galician and Cantabrian littoral. Different data sets obtained through monitoring of the oil spill by over flight observation, satellite data, measurements from buoys and modelling of oceanic parameters (e.g. temperature, salinity, density, pH, fluorescence, dissolved oxygen) have been integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS) for their access and study. The use of this GIS will allow the civil authorities and the scientific community to manage and to generate thematic cartography and to perform spatial and geostatistical analysis of the data in order to better analyze these marine pollution scenarios.