Buried pipelines monitoring

This pilot project, a collaboration between Chevron US, NPL and Surrey, aimed at forcing the application of the Integral Equation Model (IEM), developed and applied in literature to satellite imagery to extract soil moisture values, to an oily soil thus attempting, by inversion of the model, to determine a sort of oil content parameter that could be used to detect and locate the presence of leakages along buried pipelines.

Initially satellite archive images were used and then a test location was set up and monitored during the project to build a case study on which pre- and after-leakage satellite imagery would be available thus testing the model performance with a change detection approach.