Dr David Blondeau-Patissier

I am part of the CSIRO Aquatic Remote Sensing team, which sits within the Coastal and Oceanic Systems (COS) program of the CSIRO Environment business unit.

My research interests are mostly focused around coastal water quality monitoring, from phytoplankton (algal) blooms to surface pollution monitoring (such as e.g. illegal oil discharges in the coastal environment) using both field observations (marine bio-optics) and the latest satellite technology.

This includes the use of ocean colour, Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR), and occasionally thermal, satellite sensors mostly from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite missions.

A recently completed project aimed at developping a semi-automated detection system for (likely illegal) oil discharges and spills around Australia's coastline, with a particular focus on the Great Barrier Reef, using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery and a combination of empirical and transfer learning techniques.
Scope of the project and outcomes can be found at the following links, all in open access:
- CSIRO ECOS article in 2016 at the start of the project, and in 2020
- 2020 CSIRO internal report
- 2023 research article in Marine Pollution Bulletin and its associated Sentinel-1 SAR-specific deep learning training/testing dataset composed of binary chips (oi, no-oil) for feature detection-based models training or validation.

Prior to joining CSIRO Environment in Brisbane in September 2015, I have worked at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods in Darwin (RIEL, Charles Darwin University - currently maintaining an Honorary position), CSIRO Land & Water (Black Mountain) in Canberra, Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML, UK) and in France (temporary contract at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) @ LOV ) where I contributed to a variety of projects on the water quality of North Australia's tropical waters, the Great Barrier Reef, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea.

I am currently working on:

• The detection and monitoring of marine pollution by heavy fuel oil (HFO) around Australia's coastline using satellite sensors from the Sentinel-1 SAR, as well as, more recently, the detection of coastal ocean swell as a contributor.

• Water quality monitoring in Australia's coastal waters, in particular Northern Australia (the Darwin - Van Diemen Gulf region) and the Great Barrier Reef (the multi-agency research partnership eReefs ).

Please visit my ResearchGate profile for more information.