An intelligent system for maritime surveillance has been created

From Carlos III University of Madrid

Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a real application for maritime surveillance that is able to integrate and unify the information from different types of sensors and data in context through artificial intelligence and data fusion techniques.

The system has been designed by scientists from this Madrid university for Núcleo CC, a company which develops surveillance systems for the maritime and aeronautic sectors.
The first prototype will be used in the near future in Cape Verde (Africa).
Two types of sensors have been deployed there: a set of radars and a series of AIS (Automatic Identification System), which allow ships to communicate their position and give other relevant data on their location and characteristics.
These two types of sensors offer complementary data which can be fused in order to obtain better information as to what is happening in the maritime and coastal space of the area of interest.
This has been achieved by the scientists from the Applied Artificial Intelligence Group (GIAA) of UC3M, who have carried out the project “Fusión de Información en Tráfico Marítimo” (Information Fusion in Marine Traffic).

The results of this research, presented last July at the International Conference on Information Fusion in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been the creation of data fusion software which allows improved maritime surveillance to be carried out, simultaneously integrating the capabilities of the radars and the AIS localization stations deployed.
The objective is to guarantee security in the area by monitoring the different ships that are in a given maritime route which, at the same time is the entrance and exit of a commercial port.
"For that”, Jesus Garcia, one of the heads of the study from the UC3M Department of Information Technology, pointed out, “it is necessary to have a complete, accurate, and up to date picture, similar to that which is provided to air traffic controllers, of all the ships that are in the area of coverage to be able to adequately manage maritime traffic and to detect anomalies as much in advance as possible”.

The scientists developed a prototype which has been integrated into the company’s system, after having undergone validation tests to be able to execute in real time with the data supplied by its sensors.
It able to monitor 2,000 identifiable objectives between large and small vessels, with a capacity to process the data of up to 10 sensors and provide the exit with one second refresh time.
"Ships have to be able to localized 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, independent of failures in the sensors or in the different intermediate mechanisms, and in some way, what this system attempts to do is guarantee that this can be done”, explained José Luis Guerrero, another of the GIAA group researchers, who worked on this project from the UC3M Colmenarejo Campus.
"In this way”, he continued”, we are able to make it so these vessels never lose their position thus avoiding collisions or any type of problem in information management regarding the movement dynamics of these ships”.

This first prototype opens the way for posterior analysis and development, as more data and information regarding its functioning under real conditions are obtained, the scientists noted, who are now researching how to apply this information fusion technology to fields such as robotics, in unmanned vehicle navigation, artificial vision, or environmental intelligence systems.
“In all of these areas”, Professor Jesus Garcia pointed out, “information fusion technology and infrastructure are necessary to combine the data from available sensors and the contextual information in each scenario”.

Humpback whale swims a quarter of the world

Humpback whales typically travel up to 5,000km between breeding grounds

From BBCNews

In a record-breaking journey, a female humpback whale has travelled across a quarter of the globe, a distance of at least 10,000km.

The event, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is the longest documented movement by a mammal.

Its voyage was also twice the distance that the whales typically migrate each season to new breeding grounds.

Scientists say the extreme behaviour shows how "flexible" these animals are.

Explore and adapt

The female whale was spotted and photographed twice - once at its regular breeding ground in Brazil, then later off the coast of Madagascar.

The shortest distance between these two locations is 9,800km.

The research team, led by Dr Peter Stevick from the College of the Atlantic in Maine, US, thinks the whale may have travelled this far in two distinct journeys.

"If I had to guess, I'd say this animal did a normal migration to the Antarctic [to feed] and went to Madagascar from there," Dr Stevick told BBC News.

"If I were to draw a track for it, it would be from Brazil to the Southern Ocean and from there into the Indian Ocean."

The scientists were able to identify the animal from photographs that were taken of its tail, or fluke.

Each humpback whale has unique markings on the pale underside of its fluke.

The team is involved in a long-term study, collecting and examining the pictures of the whale flukes in an effort to develop a "big picture" of humpback behaviour and their migration patterns.

Such a long-distance movement between different breeding grounds is very rare.

And the fact that this was a female whale made the event even more unusual, as males are more commonly known to explore in order to find mates.

"Some exploration helps them to remain adaptable," explained Dr Stevick.

"If animals always returned to exactly the same place to breed, if anything happened to change that environment, they might not be able to adapt, so very occasional exploration could be beneficial for them."

The journey would have taken the animal at least several weeks and so far the scientists only have records of these two sightings.

"But we gather these research photographs from all over the globe," said Dr Stevick.

"So we're hopeful we will see this animal again, or see other animals doing related things."

Links :

• Nature : Humpback whale breaks migration record : swim from Brazil to Madagascar is longest known
• HuffingtonPost : Humpback whale swims 6,200 Miles, longest mammal migration recorded
  

More progress in reopening of Gulf waters for fishing

Revenge of the squid

From CNN

Nearly 7,000 more square miles of fishing waters were reopened in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, leaving only 7 percent of federal waters in the region still closed to fishing operations, authorities said.

The ninth reopening since July 22 reflects continued progress on the cleanup in the aftermath of the April BP oil spill. Officials, however, caution much work remains.
"We are guardedly optimistic," said Roy Crabtree, Southeast regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service.

The commercial and recreational waters reopened Friday are nearly 200 nautical miles south of the Florida Panhandle, between the Florida-Alabama state line and Cape San Blas, Florida, federal response officials said.

Federal testing of seafood from opened fishing areas has not shown any problems.
"Tourists and consumers should know most Gulf waters are open for fishing and seafood from these waters is safe to eat," said Jane Lubchenco, NOAA's administrator.

At its peak, the area covered by the fishing closure was 88,522 square miles, or 37 percent of Gulf waters, NOAA said. A little more than 16,000 square miles remain closed.

For the most part, NOAA first concentrated on testing waters farthest from the well, believing they would be the soonest to reopen for fishing, Crabtree said.
"We also took into account the economic importance," of fishing to a community, he said, indicating that was most vital on the western side of the Mississippi River in Louisiana and off the coasts of Mississippi and Pensacola, Florida.

The overriding concern, however, was the number of days an area was exposed to the oil, he said.
Four "blocks" of gulf waters remain closed, he said.
Their close proximity to the well may mean it will take longer for them to be deemed safe. Crabtree said he is confident all areas will be reopened to fishing, but some waters may not get the all-clear until 2011.

"It's too soon to draw conclusions about the long-term impact of this," he said, citing continued testing on fish eggs and larvae near the ocean surface, sub-surface oil and oil in Louisiana's marshes.
Christine Patrick, also of the NOAA Fisheries Service, told CNN that more than 2,700 seafood samples went through rigorous sensory and chemical testing, and none came up positive for the presence of oil or dispersants.
"No samples have been taken from opened fishing areas that haven't passed those tests," Patrick said earlier this week.

In September, NOAA reported that scientists found a decline in oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill, but did not find any "dead zones" connected to the spill.
A dead zone in Chandeleur Sound off Louisiana appears to be unrelated to the spill, federal officials said.

Links :

• NOAA reopens nearly 7,000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico to fishing
  

Citizen science: trawl World War I navy records for weather data

From Wired

A new crowdsourced science project called Old Weather lets you look through handwritten ship captains’ logs from the early 20th century and help build better climate models at the same time.

The project, which is led by Oxford University and the UK Met Office, was launched Oct. 12 by the Zooniverse, the citizen-science powerhouse behind Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo.
Until now, most Zooniverse projects have relied on using human eyes to pick out shapes and recognize features of astronomical objects, something computers are notoriously terrible at.

Old Weather puts those sharp recognition skills to work on handwriting.
The writing in these logs ranges from scribe-quality copperplate to slapdash and scruffy, and computers make too many errors to be useful for transcribing them.
But human eyes and brains are good at interpreting written words, especially as the reader starts to recognize the style of writing and the words the ship captains used.

The data collected from the logbooks will be used by scientists, geographers, historians and the public.
Climate scientists can feed hundreds of individual observations of the weather, temperature and air pressure into atmosphere models to build weather maps of the entire globe.
Data on the ocean, which is a good store of heat, can provide information on what was happening on land as well.

“We need to collect as much historical data as we can over the oceans,” said Clive Wilkinson, coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, in a how-to video on Old Weather.
“If we wish to understand what the weather will do in the future, then we need to understand what the weather was doing in the past.”

Links :

• BBCNews : WWI ships to chart past climate
  

The rise of British sea power

Investment in offshore renewable technologies is making the prospect of the UK
becoming a net exporter of energy a real possibility
(Pelamis Wave Energy Converter generating electricity into the Portuguese grid off the coast of Aguçadoura, Portugal)

From TheGuardian

Speaking in his first address to the House of Commons as energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne outlined the full scale of the government's renewable energy ambitions.
"In due course," he said, "we may once again be a net energy exporter, as we were during the peak of oil and gas in the North Sea."

The ambitious goal is more credible than it sounds, with energy industry experts convinced offshore wind farms and marine energy parks could produce more power than the UK needs.
Citing recent research from the government and the industry-backed Offshore Valuation Group, Huhne argued it was possible to re-establish the UK as a net producer of energy, as it was between 1994 and 2004 – only this time using clean and sustainable sources of energy.

The study found that harnessing just over 75% of the available offshore energy resource would produce enough renewable power for the UK to power its own economy and export excess electricity to northern Europe.
"We have a resource that's larger than we can use in the UK and to accrue value from that resource we have to export energy," explains the report's lead author Tim Helweg-Larsen.
"We need a switch in mentality to realise this offshore energy is as valuable to the rest of Europe as it is to the UK."

Plans for a 'supergrid'

There are encouraging signs that both the energy industry and the government are beginning to understand the importance of linking Britain's planned offshore energy parks with the continent.
Last year, the UK joined with eight other countries to form the North Seas Countries' Offshore Grid Initiative – a new group dedicated to developing an international "supergrid" allowing countries across northern Europe to import and export renewable electricity.
Meanwhile, Huhne recently announced plans for a new offshore planning regime designed to "help speed up the connection of new generation to the grid", while industry insiders are confident a £60m plan to upgrade the North Sea ports that will support offshore wind farms will survive the imminent spending cuts.

The Carbon Trust is also overseeing a major research project to identify new turbine foundation technologies that promise to slash installation costs.
"Bringing down the cost of offshore energy is the cornerstone that is needed if we are to become a net exporter of energy," argues Phil de Villiers, head of the Carbon Trust's Offshore Accelerator Programme.
"We estimate that with the right R&D we can reduce the cost of offshore wind farms by 40% by 2020."

All this activity has attracted engineering firms looking to cash in on the second North Sea energy boom.
In a remarkable turnaround for a British wind energy sector that only last summer was mourning the closure of Britain's only large turbine manufacturing plant, the past few months have seen General Electric, Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric and US wind turbine developer Clipper Windpower all announce plans for new offshore wind turbine factories and R&D projects in the UK.

The appeal to investors is obvious, according to Peter Madigan, head of offshore energy at trade association RenewableUK.
"We have the most installed offshore capacity and the most ambitious plans for new capacity anywhere in the world," he says, adding that offshore wind farms are also less likely to face the planning objections that have routinely blocked onshore developments.
Moreover, the UK's oil and gas industry is providing offshore energy developers with a pool of engineers with experience working in marine environments.

Marine technologies

The burgeoning success of the offshore wind industry is also likely to have a knock-on effect on the embryonic marine energy sector.
Currently, wave and tidal generators are in the pilot phase with just 2MW of marine energy capacity installed in the UK – barely enough to power 2,000 homes.
However, earlier this year the Scottish government exceeded industry expectations by leasing waters off the coast of Orkney and in the Pentland Firth, which runs between northern Scotland and the islands of Orkney, to 10 projects that could add 1.2GW of capacity, a potential 600-fold increase.
At the other end of the country, off the Cornish coast, the £40m Wave Hub facility was successfully installed last month, providing developers with a state-of-the-art test site for new marine energy technologies.

For Helweg-Larsen, the combination of offshore wind and marine energy has the potential to transform both the British economy and the wider European energy landscape.
"The attraction of going offshore for energy is that we have this vast space and very strong winds," he observes.
"It is a massive challenge to tap that resource, but it is a challenge for politicians and industry because it is technically feasible."

Links :

• YouTube : Wave power, how it works
• RenewableEnergyWorld : Catching waves
  
• Global wave market research (2009)