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An oil spill occurred off Goa, west coast of India, on 23 March 2005 due to collision of two vessels. In general, fair weather with weak winds prevails along the west coast of India during March. In that case, the spill would have moved slowly and reached the coast. However, in 2005 when this event occurred, relatively stronger winds prevailed, and these winds forced the spill to move away from the coast. The spill trajectory was dominated by winds rather than currents. The MIKE21 Spill Analysis model was used to simulate the spill trajectory. The observed spill trajectory and the slick area were in agreement with the model simulations. The present study illustrates the importance of having pre-validated trajectories of spill scenarios for selecting eco-sensitive regions for preparedness and planning suitable response strategies whenever spill episodes occur. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Digital remote sensing data of SPOT-1 (Nov. 1990), IRS-1C (Jan. 2001) and IRS-1D (Jan. 2003) have been subject to maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) to carry out change detection studies in the coastal zone of Goa. The classified images were evaluated on both homogeneous and heterogeneous regions in terms of confusion matrix as well as by field validation. The classification results of these multi-temporal data reveal that MLC gives an average accuracy of 85.69, 77.66, and 88.43% for 1990, 2001 and 2003 images respectively, and the corresponding kappa coefficients are 0.89, 0.84 and 0.86 respectively. Results of MLC indicate that there is an increase in urban land, vegetation and water body reduction in barren land and sandy beach along the coastal zone of Goa. The urbanization is attributed to tourism boom-related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]