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In the frame of the German-Indonesian pilot study IndoNACE (Indonesian Seas Numerical Assessment of the Coastal Environment), a wealth of SAR data of two dedicated regions in Indonesian waters are being analysed with respect to the imaging of marine oil pollution. Numerical tracer studies using a regional 3-d numerical model are used to aid those analyses and to help understanding the observed seasonal variations in marine oil pollution. Our first results are based on 130 ENVISAT ASAR images of each of the two regions of interest, the ‘Western Java Sea’ and the ‘Makassar Strait’ and indicate that most pollution was found in areas of high ship traffic and of intense oil production.

We analyzed a large amount of high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data of exposed intertidal flats on the German North Sea coast with respect to the imaging of sediments, macrophytes, and mussels. TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 images of four test areas acquired from 2008 to 2013 form the basis for the present investigation and are used to demonstrate that pairs of SAR images, if combined through basic algebraic operations, can already provide indicators for bivalve (oyster and mussel) beds. Our results show evidence that single-acquisition, dual-polarization SAR imagery can be used in this respect. The polarization coefficient (i.e., the normalized difference polarization ratio) can be used to infer indicators for oyster and blue-mussel beds.

In the present study we analyze manifestations of submeso- and mesoscale eddies in the Western Mediterranean Sea found in Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) imagery of 2010–2011. Location of mesoscale eddies found in the imagery outlined the main stream of the basin. Special attention is being paid to the relation between the numbers of cyclonic and anticyclonic eddies at different spatial scales. It is shown that eddies less than 60 km in diameter are dominantly cyclonic; at some intermediate scales (about 70 km) there is a balance between the numbers of cyclonic and anticyclonic eddies and at largest scales (>100 km) eddies are predominantly anticyclonic.