Plastics in the marine environment are a cause for major global concern due to their widespread and increasing presence. However, sources and sinks of plastics to the marine environment are not well constrained, which has been linked to the lack of in situ observations. Accumulation of plastics on shore is measured by monitoring agencies and volunteer citizen groups with a disparity of protocols. Conversely, sampling efforts are biased towards more accessible shorelines, and limited in time by the availability of resources. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop Earth Observation techniques to provide standardised, global and continuous monitoring of plastics accumulation on the shore. In this context, a feasibility study has been funded by ESA: OPTIMAL – Optical methods for Marine Litter detection which will be performing controlled experiments on the UK shoreline to assess the accuracy and precision of optical detection of plastics by high resolution sensors such as MSI on ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellite. To complement this study, support was given by the NERC ARF and FSF facilities to obtain measurements of targets from hyperspectral radiometers on the aircraft and in situ, and study the effects of changing sub-pixel resolution, wavelength resolution and atmospheric correction on known standard targets on the shore line.

This project used NERC-ARF (NERC Airborne Research Facility) Remote Sensing instruments collected on board the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Twin-Otter aircraft.