Priscila Martins Oliveira da Costa, student of the Graduate Program in Geosciences and the Human Resources Training Program (PRH 19) of the National Petroleum Agency (ANP), received the award Geological Remote Sensing Group Annual Student Award, intended for doctoral or master's students working with geology and remote sensing. The student is supervised in her doctorate by professor Carlos Roberto Souza Filho, from the Department of Geology and Natural Resources, and co-supervised by Rebecca Del Papa Moreira Scafutto and Guillaumne Lassalle, both postdocs at the IG. The project is supported by the ANP and a broader project financed by TotalEnergies.
According to advisor Carlos Roberto Souza Filho, the Geological Remote Sensing Group (GRSG) is a special interest group of the Geological Society of London (GeolSoc) and the Society for Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry (RSPSoc). “It is an association of enthusiasts interested in the geological aspects of remote sensing. The current membership includes geologists and remote sensing specialists employed in industry, academia and government agencies, as well as graduate students working on related research projects. Although the main bodies are based in the UK, the GRSG is an international organization with members all over the world”, explains the professor.
Priscila's doctoral project focuses on the classification and characterization of oil slicks in the marine environment (offshore) using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. “For this, two work fronts were adopted: one computational and the other experimental. The computational stage aims at the elaboration of a model capable of discriminating between petroleum and vegetable oil (false positive) in a totally unsupervised way, without the intervention of specialists. The experimental stage aims to evaluate an innovative multifrequency SAR/drone system for the characterization of oil slicks based on a controlled experiment simulating an oil spill at sea”, points out the graduate student.
The student explains that the field experiment, installed at CPQBA (Multidisciplinary Center for Chemical, Biological and Agricultural Research) from Unicamp, was designed to simulate real-scale oil spills. “The leaks were visualized in an unprecedented way using a SAR system coupled to a drone from the company RADAZ that operates on three frequencies simultaneously. The expected results using this holistic approach include the possibility of remotely extracting oil properties, such as thickness and density, from analysis of the oil backscatter recorded in SAR images”, says Priscila.
Two other IG students supervised by Carlos Roberto were awarded in previous editions. In 2016, Saeid Asadzadeh received the award in the Doctorate category. In 2019, Lais Camargo Novaes was awarded in the Master's category. Three students are awarded annually. The award provides financial support (£500), which can be used to cover activities related to field research or participation in scientific events. In return, winners must contribute an article to the GRSG newsletter and present at the Group's annual conference. The GRSG 2023 conference will take place in London in December.
