SkyTruth announces the launch of Cerulean, a new technology platform to detect ocean polluters. Recently at COP 28, we launched the beta version of Cerulean, SkyTruth's long-awaited global monitoring system for ocean oil pollution and its possible sources. Cerulean is the first free, publicly available tool that maps and monitors ocean industrial pollution events and attributes them to specific actors using machine learning, cloud computing, and satellite imagery ..read more

People & Places As the world continues to grapple with environmental challenges, tools like SkyTruth Alerts have become invaluable for those who are passionate about tracking and responding to environmental incidents. In 2023, SkyTruth introduced changes that expand the platform’s capabilities and provide additional monitoring opportunities. In this blog post, we’ll explore three new incident types added to SkyTruth Alerts – California Hazardous Materials Spills, Texas Oil and Gas Drilling Permits, and U.K. Oil and Gas Spills at Sea ..read more

See It, Change It SkyTruth is working to create the world’s first publicly accessible dataset of FSOs and FPSOs, to shed light on their behavior and monitor them for pollution events. Over the last 19 months, SkyTruth has been working with investigative reporters from the Associated Press on a story that highlights the risks posed by aging vessels which are linked to offshore oil production ..read more

See It, Change It In the early hours of February 28, the MT Princess Empress -- an oil tanker following a common shipping route in the Philippines -- encountered rough seas and strong winds while en route from Limay, Bataan to Iloilo City. The ship started to take on water and suffered engine trouble as the waves tossed it around in the waters off Oriental Mindoro. After putting out a distress call, the captain and 19 crewmembers were rescued from the sinking tanker by a nearby cargo ship. The unmanned Princess Empress continued to drift toward Balingawan Point in Naujan, where it finally sub ..read more

SkyTruth Spotlight SkyTruth intern Kennedy Lawson follows the trail of an offshore oil slick with no clear link to vessels or infrastructure. As a newbie, at first the tech-heavy work intimidated me; it was difficult to imagine how I would fit in. That fear was quickly replaced with excitement. On my first day, I met the team and developed a better understanding of exactly how I would contribute to environmental change ..read more

See It, Change It SkyTruth’s project Cerulean helped intern Breanna Xiong document Trinidad and Tobago’s chronic oil pollution problem. Trinidad and Tobago - the small dual-island Caribbean nation - has been a top exporter of liquefied natural gas for years. Because of its significant oil and gas exploration, and what some Trinidadians would call poor corporate and government responsibility, oil leakages from offshore infrastructure are very common events in Trinidad’s waters. With the help of satellite imagery, SkyTruth has been able to directly observe and continuously monitor Trinidad’s ch ..read more

People & Places With the intense concentration of polluters and frequent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the watchdog group Healthy Gulf relies on Alerts to flag dangerous incidents. Naomi Yoder works as a geospatial analyst for the environmental group Healthy Gulf identifying pollution events, tracking trends and pushing for reform to reduce pollution. “SkyTruth Alerts is so useful. I can’t say it enough ..read more

See It, Change It Close inspection of satellite imagery reveals sources of oil pollution off Africa’s coast, near vulnerable communities Nigeria is not only the largest economy in Africa, but also the largest exporter of crude oil on the continent, exporting 1.27 million barrels per day in 2021. The Nigerian economy is—and historically has been—reliant on the hydrocarbon industry for foreign exchange income and tax revenue. The reliance on crude oil in particular for income generation has led to the widespread proliferation of offshore drilling operations in the petroleum-rich Niger Delta Bas ..read more

See It, Change It SkyTruth helped investigative journalists report on the extent of the offshore oil pollution problem in Europe. For the past eight months, SkyTruth has been working with a team of journalists and media outlets associated with Lighthouse Reports investigating the problem of chronic (and often illegal) oil pollution by vessels at sea transiting European waters. These outlets recently released a groundbreaking series of stories. In this blog post we explain how SkyTruth developed the estimates used by these journalists to reveal the extent of oily bilge waste in European waters ..read more

SkyTruth Spotlight SkyTruth’s machine learning engineer, Jona Raphael, grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia; SkyTruth’s home base. But it was his travels around the world that convinced him to knock on our door. “I’ve always had an interest in sustainability,” Jona says. At SkyTruth, that interest translates into developing Cerulean, a machine learning model that automatically processes thousands of satellite images a day to detect oil pollution in the ocean ..read more