RESUMO
In undertaking the rapid diagnostics of water conditions (for organic impurities, eutrophication etc.), it is expedient to confine the effort to establishing the statistically normal state and departures from it rather than to seek the full chemical composition of the medium. What others have termed spectral signatures obtained by such methods as total luminescent spectroscopy can serve as representative indicators of both background conditions and those deviating from the normal. In this paper we show how, with the aid of laboratory catalogs of spectral signatures, it is possible to detect oil pollution at levels substantially below those of slicks (of a few microliters per liter) and to identify groups of pollutants (by remote sensing). And we describe a spectroscopic lidar we developed for marine studies.