Fingerprinting the Refugio Oil Spill using Topographic Signal Processing of Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatographic Images

Oil spill fingerprinting aims to determine whether oil samples originate from the source of the spill or from a different source. This can be done by comparing the composition of hydrocarbons in each oil sample’s two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) image. In this work, we compare oil samples taken from the 2015 Refugio Oil Spill with oil samples taken elsewhere. We use an approach called Peak Topography Mapping (PTM) which aims to automatically compare oil samples using both target and non-target peaks in the GCxGC image. Results suggest that the non-target peaks analyzed in PTM can provide information beyond that of solely target-based analysis.