Spectrum of Soil Contaminated With Hydrocarbons in North-West Suez Gulf in Egypt

Hydrocarbon micro-seepage is a common phenomenon occurring in areas with the presence of onshore oil tanks and transferring pipelines, characterized by the abnormal natural surface spectral landscape characteristics of mineral alteration features and geobotanic anomalies like formatting dark spots that can be detected by satellite imagery. Therefore, this study aims to find spatial models of oil contaminated areas through detection approaches of hydrocarbon micro seepage and its relationship with the physical condition of study area by utilized the satellite imagery. This has been achieved by maximum likelihood algorithm on ENVI application to get land surface classification, using multi-spectral satellite data of Sentinel-2 integrated with field check and previous studies on the same area. The accuracy assessment using confusion matrix showed acceptable percentage with 83.33 % of random points inside the studied area. The contrast between contaminated areas and other areas was successfully used to map spatial distribution of hydrocarbon pollution in the El Suez refinery plant area. The methodology can be positively used to detect oil spills beside storage tanks and oil transfer pipelines, besides environmental management of oil pollution at or near the land surface.