Background and Objectives: The global corona outbreak has had a direct impact on many navigation activities around the world. Maritime navigation is one of the main commercial and economic activities. The purpose of this study is to monitor maritime traffic in the Strategic and International Strait of Hormuz and the port of Pol during the Corona outbreak. In line with the objectives of this research, VV polarization of Sentinel-1 radar images in C band was used. These images were processed in the Google Earth Engine cloud environment to identify and extract marine vehicles, including ships. The results of this study showed that traffic and maritime traffic in the two study areas of the Strait of Hormuz and Bandar Pol in April and May 2020 compared to the same month in 2018 and 2019 has a significant decrease, which has a direct impact on the shipping industry. But with the normalization of the corona situation and the resumption of maritime activities again in 2021, maritime traffic and traffic has increased as in the pre-corona period. In general, this study demonstrates the role of using satellite data, especially artificial aperture radar images, in marine applications and global crisis management, as well as the rapid processing of high-volume radar data in the Google Earth Engine cloud.
The outbreak of coronary heart disease (Covid-19) began in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, and later spread worldwide. To prevent the spread of Covid disease, many countries imposed restrictions on communities and travel. In Europe, the European Space Agency has also considered the Covid-19 epidemic in reducing air pollution and its indirect effects on the environment. In Europe, the European Space Agency has also paid attention to the Covid-19 epidemic in reducing air pollution and its indirect effects on the environment. Sea transportation is one of the oldest methods of transportation that is used today to transport goods and passengers to other parts of the country, regionally and internationally. For this reason, the monitoring of maritime traffic in any country is of great importance. Iran's geographical location has also been surrounded by the busiest seas from the north and south, as about 30% of the world's maritime transport takes place in the Persian Gulf. During the quarantine period, many countries imposed restrictions. These restrictions also included ports, shipping and sea voyages, disrupting the movement of passengers, crew and preventing ships from entering ports. Ultimately, all of these actions have disrupted maritime traffic. The maritime transport industry has been affected since the outbreak of Covid-19 because many countries closed maritime ports during the quarantine period and banned export and import activities. Today, Syntactic aperture radar (SAR) radar waves are used to detect ships because of their advantages over optical data. Radar waves have the ability to detect objects at sea. Google Earth Engine is one of the most popular geographic data processing systems that is used with free access to users to capture and process images. This platform can process large amounts of data in the shortest possible time, which makes it easy to use geographic time series data. It is one of the Sentinel-1 radar data in the engine inheritance system.
Methods: In the present study, Sentinel-1 time series data in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 with VV polarization were used. In order to process Sentinel-1 data, Google Earth Engine system was used and then the output map in ArcGIS software was converted from TIF format to vector.
Findings: According to the maps created during the corona outbreak in the Strait of Hormuz and the port of Pol, the traffic of ships and marine vehicles has increased in the pre-corona period (2018 and 2019), respectively, but during the corona (2020) due to quarantine conditions and traffic restrictions. Maritime traffic has decreased significantly compared to the previous year. However, in the post-Corona period (2021), due to the normalization of epidemic conditions and the resumption of maritime and shipping activities, the traffic of marine vehicles has increased again.
Conclusion: In this study, an attempt was made to monitor the shipping industry in the Strait of Hormuz and the port of Pol by using satellite data during the corona outbreak and epidemic. Based on the results, it can be concluded that Sentinel-1 radar data in C-band to manage the maritime crisis in the event of a catastrophic disaster can help advance the goals of the shipping industry in the short to long term. This short-term and long-term advancement requires an instant monitoring system that Google Earth Engine online system has been able to well establish its place in the world of remote sensing