Yojiro Utsunomiya 
  
Construction of an Internet Geographical Information System for usein clearing offshore and 
onshore oil spills 
Yojiro UISUNOMIYA*, Muneo YOSHIE**, Hideo MIURA ***Hiedeki SHIMAMURA *** Tomohito TSUCHIYA *** 
Water and Soil Environment Div. , National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan. 
utunomiy @nies.go.jp, 
** Port and Harbour Research Institute, Japan 
yoshie  cc.phri.go.jp 
***Pasco com, Japan 
HYPERLINKmiura@pascokankyo.co.jp 
Hideki Shimamura G sed.pasco.co.jp 
HYPERLINKtsuchiya 0 pascokankyo.co.jp 
Keywords: Intemet GIS, oil spil5, disaster countermeasure 
ABSTRACT 
Oil spilt from the Russian tanker Nakhodka, which sank in the Sea of Japan, contaminated the coast of central and 
northwestern Japan. Organizations and many volunteers worked to remove oil and grease that floated and adhered to 
sand grains, shingle/pebbles and rocks in the coastal zones. During the clean-up operation, it became apparent that in 
some places there was an overconcentration of volunteers, administrative delays in implementing the oil removal, 
misleading results of irrelevant simulation modeling, and insufficient communication of information about oil drifting. 
We therefore constructed a Geographical Information System (GIS) in order to improve the above-mentioned 
circumstances and the efficient clearing of oil from the coast. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The oil spill from the Russian tanker Nakhodka, which sank 
in the Japan Sea, 106 km north-northeast of Tsushima 
Island on 2 January 1997, caused severe damage to the sea 
and coastline of the Japanese Islands. To counteract any 
repetition of such a man-made disaster, the National Land 
Agency promoted a special project entitled ‘Investigation 
for the construction of a database of environmental and 
disaster information for use in oil spill disasters" in. fiscal 
year 1998-90, As part of this project, we constructed a 
Geographical Information System (GIS) for effective 
management of oil spilk in the sea and along coastlines. 
Here we outline the system which is now in test operation 
in our laboratory. 
2STRUCTURE OF GIS FORMANAGEMENT 
OF OIL SPILLS 
2.1 Subsystem of GIS 
Our system for the efficient and effective cleaning of spilt oil 
fromsea and coastal zones consists of several subsysterrs 
and functions. It has two components; one is accessible to 
the public, and the other is a closed system for specialists 
such as network/intemet GIS administrators on the server 
side and in govemmental offices. However, sharp 
discrimination between these components is not applied 
because our system is still at the prototype stage. 
(1) Display of information about natural resources 
and industrial activity. 
(2) System for prediction of spilt oil drifting ashore 
using satellite information and surveillance data. 
(3) Support system for volunteer activity in cleaning 
the sea and coastal zones. 
(4) System for retrieving information about 
equipment and materials for cleaning spilt oil 
(5) Internet GIS 
22, Operational environment 
The operational environment and application software of 
our Internet GIS are as follows. 
a) Hardware: Gateway 2000 G7-450JP CPU: 
Pentium II 450MHz Memory: 128 MB 
b) OS: Windows NT4.0 Workstation SP4 Peer Web 
Server 3.0 
c) Software: Arc View 3.0a, Spatial Analyst 1.0a, 
Internet Map Server 1.0A, Image Analysis 1.0 
As listed above, this systemis constructed using software 
such as Windows edition ArcView3, Arc View Internet 
Map Server, Spatial Analyst (ESRI Co), and Image 
Analysis (ERDAS Co). The basic data formats in our 
  
336 International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part B1. Amsterdam 2000. 
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