Surveillance tech helped INTERPOL crack down on marine pollution crime

INTERPOL launched “Operation 30 Days at Sea” in cooperation with Europol to address the marine pollution violations and geospatial technologies were at the forefront of this operation.

 

 From GW Prime

 

This case study is based on a Report originally published by INTERPOL, Reference:2019/405/OEC/ILM/ENS/BNI.

Marine pollution is a serious threat to environmental health.

It also leads to transnational organized crime, with offenders disposing of pollutants in the sea to save cost on waste treatment.

In order to address the complex nature of this crime, law enforcement agencies have to come up with a comprehensive response that is internationally coordinated.

To foster such a response, INTERPOL’s Pollution Crime Working Group (PCWG) launched “Operation 30 Days at Sea” in cooperation with Europol in 2018.

Geospatial technologies such as satellite imagery, aerial surveillance systems, vessel tracking systems and mobile applications were at the forefront of the operation.

Scope: Targeting marine pollution offences globally

The operation aimed at bringing together relevant national enforcement and environmental protection agencies to act in concert against marine pollution, by targeting the following activities:

• Illegal discharge from vessels and offshore platforms
• Ocean dumping; ship breaking
• Violations of ship emission regulations
• Land-based and river pollution impacting the marine environment

Objective: Enhancing marine pollution enforcement

The overall objective of the Operation was to enhance the global law enforcement response to marine pollution in violation of international conventions and national legislations, to improve sea quality.

The Operation involved supporting investigations to identify, arrest and prosecute individuals and/or companies responsible for marine pollution through:

Intelligence gathering and international cooperation;

Collecting and analyzing geospatial data to profile risk indicators, modus operandi and hotspots, with a view to enhance early detection of violations and develop long-term law enforcement strategies.

 

Operational activities

As many as 58 countries joined the “Operation 30 Days at Sea”, mobilizing 276 national agencies (Figure 1).

Each participating country defined its own targets and operational activities based on its national priorities and technological capabilities.

Figure 1. Map and list of participating countries in the Operation

Intelligence-led operational targets

In majority of participating countries, target identification resulted from intelligence gathering through screening vessels and companies of interest based on records of non-compliance.

Variety of sources were used, including national compliance targeting matrix for marine traffic and related lists of ships of interest; and databases of the regional MoUs on Port State Control.
Some countries coupled historical data with intelligence collected during the Operation through vessel traffic management information systems, National Aerial Surveillance Program over flights, and satellite monitoring.

• Thailand conducted a multi-target operation deploying onshore and offshore assets to inspect ports, coastal areas and territorial waters.
• Four intelligence principles guided target selection: probability, information sharing, intelligence gathering and statistical leads.
• Portugal selected its operational targets through an intelligence gathering and analysis cycle as part of an integrated management approach at strategic, tactical and operational levels.
• Argentina conducted operational actions including intelligence gathering, satellite monitoring, and aerial surveillance, on board inspections, vessel tracking and sea patrolling coordinated by a maritime traffic system that was operational 24/7.
• In Germany, authorities performed 313 inspections, 28 air surveillance flights, 27 AIS investigations and analyzed over 40 satellite pictures.
• As a result, they detected 165 marine pollution offenses and initiated 37 investigations on water pollution crime and illegal shipments from Europe.
• The total security deposits exceeded EUR 63,000 (USD71, 000).
• Angola deployed several navy units with maritime and aerial assets, under the Command and Coordination Centre in Luanda.
  

Geospatial technologies deployed

 

The Operation saw an extensive use of both traditional surveillance vehicles and equipment, such as aerial surveillance and sea patrols, and innovative technologies and techniques applied to marine pollution detection.

Innovative techniques and technologies deployed by countries during the Operation included:

• Satellite imagery;
• Advanced aerial surveillance technologies: drones, including technologies such as sulphur sensors and mapping software; aircrafts equipped with side looking airborne radar (SLAR), electro optical infrared camera system (EO/IR) and infrared and ultraviolet line scanner (IR/UV);
• Vessel tracking systems, including automatic identification systems (AIS) and various software and mobile applications;
• Various IT equipment such as facial capturing systems, fingerprints scanning systems, night vision cameras, XRF scanners, X-ray scanners and special equipment for oil spills;
• The Operation marked the first integration of EMSA’s (European Maritime Safety Agency) CleanSeaNet and SafeSeaNet satellite systems into an INTERPOL operation, benefiting endeavors in several countries through satellite imagery, including in Denmark, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
• Indonesia focused its operation on oil spill monitoring using satellite sensors, namely ESA Sentinel Image, Lapan Landsat Image, SeonSE BARATA-BROL KKP application, and Bakamla’s Dashboard application.
• 218 radar images were received, processed and analyzed in near real time at INDESO station.
• Sweden mapped mineral-oil pollution incidents through satellite imagery.
• In the Republic of Korea, the use of AIS supporting 552 inspections allowed detection of 49 violations, including 11 cases of discharge of noxious liquid substances resulting from tank washing.
• In Pakistan, satellite imagery was instrumental to identifying the vessel responsible for a large oil spillage detected during the Operation, with over 40 metric tons of bunker oil dumped in the sea.
• In Kenya, the use of Sea Vision technology and TV32 was instrumental to identifying vessels of interest by providing real-time traffic information in areas around suspicious maritime events.
• The technology also assisted the operation team to prioritize vessels for inspections.
• Transport Canada deployed its National Aerial Surveillance Program conducting 20 night flights to detect pollution incidents.
• Aircraft were equipped with night vision cameras, Side Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR), Electro-optical Infrared Cameras (EO/IR) and Infrared/Ultraviolet Line Scanners (IR/UV).
• In several countries, including Finland, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, operational tactics encompassed aerial surveillance.
• For example, France’s POLMAR helicopters and aircrafts conducted 187.6 hours of surveillance flights.
• In Norway, the use of drones with Sulphur detectors found the noncompliance of vessels with regulations against air pollution from ships.
• Vessels tracking systems, including automatic identification system (AIS), software and applications, were used in Angola to monitor vessels positions and itineraries, and detect risk indicators.
  

Key achievements

15,446 Inspections were conducted worldwide which resulted in the detection of 1,507 marine pollution-related offences (Figure 2) and 701 investigations initiated with subsequent fines and prosecutions in numerous cases.
Cases reported by national authorities to INTERPOL allowed to identify 202 vessels and 76 companies involved in marine-pollution offences.

Figure 2. Map of the key results of the Operation

• The 1,507 marine pollution related offences detected on land, in internal waters or at sea area portion of the over 2,000 violations uncovered during the operation, including hundreds of minor violations and deficiencies and cases related to other types of offences, such as fishery crime, drug trafficking and violations of safety regulations, which were detected during multipurpose inspections.
• The immediate impact of this Operation was the effective containment of sea contamination following a large number of incidents and violations in every regions of the world, along with the disruption of some illicit businesses with subsequent arrests and prosecutions.
• While in some countries use of drones, satellite imagery, etc. were incorporated routinely in marine pollution enforcement, in other nations, the Operation triggered their use. For example, Nigeria experienced the unprecedented use of drones for port inspections for the first time. Flyovers of the ports were conducted with orthomosaic photogrammetry for mapping purposes, as well as to observe shipping movements and identify potential pollution events. This initiative marked an important step forward in Nigeria’s capacity to detect marine pollution crimes.
  

Strategic and long-terms impacts

The impact of this Operation and the application of geospatial technologies was particularly important in a number of African, Asian and Pacific countries, where marine pollution is still a very new and neglected area of law enforcement.
In these countries, the development of technical capacities to address challenges, and advocacy at the policy level to increase prioritization of marine pollution enforcement was encouraged.
The Operation generated actionable intelligence from the analysis of the operational results, to drive future targeted intelligence-led marine pollution operations.

England’s Sea-Kit leads rivals in race to map Earth’s seabed

The Maxlimer on its return from the Atlantic.
Photographer: Rich Edwards, Enp Media

 

From Bloomberg by Amy Thomson

A comprehensive atlas would help find minerals needed for electric cars and mobile phones.

On July 24 a 40-foot-long boat called Maxlimer set out from the port of Plymouth on the southern coast of England, steering southwest out of the English Channel into the open ocean.
The unmanned vessel, guided by pilots at a computer onshore, carries sonar that sends out an average of 10,000 sound pulses per hour to chart the topography of the ocean floor.
The goal of the boat’s three-week journey was to put together for the first time a detailed map of about 600 square miles of Europe’s continental shelf, the place where the ocean floor plunges from a few hundred feet beneath the surface to several thousand.

As the Maxlimer’s sonar pings bounced off the seabed, scientists around the world took turns listening for alarms indicating gales, approaching ships, or problems with the vessel’s sensors.
The Maxlimer, whose bullet-shaped hull looks like a submarine that’s just surfaced, had never spent this long a time in such a harsh environment, and researchers fretted a storm might hobble it, says Neil Tinmouth, 37, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit International Ltd., the company that builds the £1.3 million ($1.7 million) boats.
“We wanted to push the limits,” he says, “to do operations in open oceans where you don’t know what you’re going to encounter.”

Sea-Kit is at the forefront of accelerating efforts to map the ocean floor, a terrain that’s less understood than the surfaces of the moon or Mars.
Only 20% of the seabed has been mapped, and an atlas would boost efforts to find everything from minerals used in electric cars and mobile phones to new species.
The Seabed 2030 project worked with Sea-Kit on the voyage, getting data for its mission to map the ocean floor in the next decade and ultimately make the data freely available.
The initiative comes as the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority drafts a framework to allow deep-ocean mining, which may come into effect next year.

The Remote Operations Centre at Sea-Kit’s base in Tollesbury, England.
The Sea-Kit team is remotely controlling and monitoring the Maxlimer at sea.
Photographer: Rich Edwards, Enp Media

The ISA is grappling with how to fairly distribute wealth from international waters and protect the poorly understood ecosystems of the deep ocean.
“The law of the sea was written on the idea that if you use something that belongs to everybody, it’s equally shared,” says Marzia Rovere, a marine geologist at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Bologna, Italy, who’s been working on the UN framework.
“How to do this—it’s still a matter of debate.”

For centuries, sailors have sought to measure the ocean’s depth as a way to gauge the approaching shore and gain a better understanding of the topography.
Until the early 20th century, the technology was simple: a weight and a long rope.
The Challenger expedition in the 1870s used such sounding lines for a four-year trip that sought to map the seabed and catalog creatures in various parts of the ocean; it discovered the Mariana Trench, home to what’s now called the Challenger Deep, at more than 35,000 feet the deepest known part of the ocean.
After the Titanic sank in 1912, explorers proposed using sound waves to find its hull in the North Atlantic, accelerating the development of sonar, the most common technique used today.

Using the Sea-Kit Maxlimer, GEBCO-NF, a 14-nation team let by Rochelle Wigley and Yulia Zarayskaya, last year won the Ocean Discovery XPrize, netting $4 million in the competition aimed at nurturing technologies for mapping the seabed.
Other groups submitted ideas such as deploying multiple robots to map an area quickly, dropping retrievable pods from drones, and using lasers to determine the shape of the terrain.
The XPrize judges said a key differentiator for Sea-Kit was the way it tapped cloud technology to process data and create a detailed map in a tight, 48-hour window.

Corporations are also starting to study the ocean’s depths.
Ocean Infinity, based in Austin, does surveys for the oil industry with robots that can map terrain 20,000 feet below the surface.
International Business Machines Corp. is working with marine researcher Promare to build the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, which next year will attempt an Atlantic crossing guided by artificial intelligence.
Fugro NV, a Dutch company that also serves energy producers, has been developing similar mapping technologies—and this year it bought two of Sea-Kit’s boats and invested in the company.

Teledyne Caris and researchers this summer analyzed the 1.5 billion data points the Maxlimer gathered.
Schools of fish, temperature changes, and the drop-off of an underwater canyon can muddy the information coming back from the sonar; until recently, sorting through those anomalies to build an accurate map took an hour of computer time for every hour spent collecting data.
AI has cut that to less than 10 minutes.

Those are the kinds of advances needed to reach the goal of mapping the entire ocean, says Jyotika Virmani, who was executive director of the XPrize.
With that information in hand—and available to the public, as envisioned by Seabed 2030—scientists will better understand, say, where a tsunami might hit, how much sea levels might rise because of climate change, and potential shifts in ocean currents as temperatures climb.
“It works to everyone’s advantage to get this information out,” says Virmani, who now runs the Schmidt Ocean Institute, established by former Google head Eric Schmidt.
“Once we know what’s there in its entirety, we can really truly start to figure out what’s what on this planet.”

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : One-fifth of Earth's ocean floor is now mapped / Mappers look to chart world's ocean floor by 2030 / An ambitious project aims to map the entire ocean floor. It ... / Earth's final frontier: the global race to map the entire ocean floor / Robots ahoy! Mapping Earth's surface / Underwater drones nearly triple data from the ocean floor / Ocean floor to be mapped by 2030 / Teams autonomously mapping the depths ...
• TheNextWeb : MIT’s new autonomous boat ruled Amsterdam’s canals for 3 hours
• Martime Executive : Techno Pilgrims 

22nd October 1884: International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C. the Greenwich prime meridian

 

At the start of the 19th century there was no universally agreed point from which to measure longitude, and this caused problems both for identifying geographical locations and measuring time.

Although latitude was able to be measured from the equator, variations in geographical longitude meant that different towns and cities had slightly differing time standards since the vast majority of settlements around the world observed local mean solar time.

 

The arrival of the railways in the mid-19th century increased the need for a standardised time across the network, since local time would differ in all the towns the train visited.

In Great Britain, Greenwich Mean Time was first adopted by the Great Western Railway and in 1870 Charles F. Dowd proposed a unified time system for North America based on the Washington Meridian.

 

Following further developments by Sandford Fleming and Cleveland Abbe, who proposed time zones for the entire world, U.S. President Chester Arthur requested a conference to discuss the choice of ‘a meridian to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the world’.

 

41 delegates from 26 nations travelled to Washington, D.C. where the International Meridian Conference began on 1 October 1884.

Three weeks later, on 22 October, they adopted a series of resolutions that resulted in the Greenwich Meridian becoming the international standard for zero degrees longitude, ensuring continuity with most existing nautical charts.

Nevertheless the resolution was not accepted unanimously since San Domingo voted against, and both France and Brazil abstained.

 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Farewell Greenwich Mean Time / Opinion: How the Prime Meridian changed ...  / Lines of Longitude explained, with maps / Tintin and location by geographic coordinates / Lines of Longitude explained, with maps / Longitude - The story of a lone genius who ... / Navigating 18th-century science: Board of Longitude archive ... / Opinion: How the Prime Meridian changed ...  / GeoGarage Time Zone API
  

Why measure wind?

Learn how Earth’s wind is generated and why we need to measure it.

Discover how ESA’s Aeolus satellite will use laser technology to measure these invisible streams of air to help understand our climate and to improve our weather forecasts.

COVID-inspired adventure takes amateur sailors from Sunshine Coast to Great Keppel on 'floating deckchair'

After battling challenging conditions at sea for six days, the pair finally arrived at Great Keppel Island.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

From ABC by Kylie Bartholomew

Holed up during COVID-19 restrictions in Queensland, amid an endless cycle of "wake up, check the phone, work, eat, sleep, repeat", Mike Swaine hatched a plan to escape.

The Sunshine Coast adventurer and his mate Joel decided to bunnyhop their way 300 nautical miles up the Queensland coastline from the Sunshine Coast to Great Keppel Island on a 17-foot Hobie Cat.

"I probably wouldn't have done it if COVID-19 hadn't hit," Mr Swaine said.

Over six days the two men were at the mercy of Mother Nature — at times nearly capsizing in brutal, 30-knot gusts with fully sheeted sails to zero wind and a dead motor in the dark.

"And you know, out in this little floating deckchair, that far out at sea is pretty sketchy," Mr Swaine said.

Powered primarily by wind, with no quarters below deck, riding on a Hobie Cat means feeling every wave and movement of the ocean.

The small catamaran was a somewhat unusual choice of vessel for such a long, multi-day journey, but with international and interstate travel off the cards, Mr Swaine wanted to find a new way to explore his home state.

"We're so lucky up here in Queensland that we still have a freedom in so many ways," he said.

"And we took advantage of that and our little catamaran got us to see our beautiful coastline."

An escape from lockdown

Swaine (L) with mate Joel Schulz, says the vessel's name, 'Betsy — the Ruby Princess', was a tribute to his grandmother — and the pandemic.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

Mr Swaine is an aerial photographer by trade but when the pandemic hit, his interstate travel was ground to a halt.

Seeking an escape, he embarked on lengthy YouTube binge sessions — watching marine adventurers from around the world.

It was in those binge sessions that the idea for his own Hobie Cat adventure was born.

Travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19 left aerial photographer Mike Swaine with more time to ponder other types of adventures.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

Experienced on the water, but not a sailor, Mr Swaine put plans in motion to sail the 17-foot Hobie Cat from south-east to central Queensland.

His mate Joel Schulz, aka the 'Coastal Cowboy', needed no convincing to be his right-hand man.

'Betsy the Ruby Princess'

 

 A map charting the pair's 300-nautical-mile adventure.

(Supplied: Google)

 

Visualization with the GeoGarage platform (AHS nautical raster chart)

 
The amateurs equipped themselves with sailing information via YouTube videos and gathered the necessary safety equipment.

"We didn't take that lightly and we didn't take having to get rescue services lightly," Mr Swaine said.
"We had three EPIRBs [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons] and we had radios and we had contingency plans in place."

With the bare essentials on board, they set sail on 'Betsy, the Ruby Princess' — named out of "respect" of the pandemic.

 

Joel Schulz, the 'Coastal Cowboy', was excited to go along for the ride.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

Stuck in the dark to frolicking dolphins

They hoped for idyllic conditions but at times feared for their lives.

"There was, at one point, a Big Woody Island and in between Fraser Island and Hervey Bay when the boat turned into the wind [30 knot gusts] and the waves started coming over, we had no methodology of power and we had to try and jibe the boat," Mr Swaine said.
"We couldn't pull the jib out to turn the boat around because the wind was so strong, but as soon as we turn beam onto the wind, the boat would capsize.
"That was a point where there's a split second you're like, 'Man this is actually really serious, we have to take this seriously, we have to respect the ocean'."

 

The pair faced challenging conditions along the way.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

As they headed north, the wind not only eased but stopped completely as they approached Bustard Head at dusk.

Mr Swaine said it was a "scary experience", exacerbated when Mr Schulz accidentally dropping the anchor overboard — without a line attached.
"So we're like, 'OK', we had a little two-horsepower motor, we fired up the motor, and then the motor went for a while — then the motor stops," Mr Swaine said.
"There's some rocky shoals where the waves are breaking, it was biggish surf by that stage, it'd dropped a little bit.
"But it was very uncomfortable and floating around in this little boat in the dark, it was a scary experience."

But then there was the flip side — being able to pull into any beach, seeing the moon and sun rise each day and the joy of watching dolphins and whales dance around the boat.

Swaine says pulling up to any beach for the night was a highlight of the trip.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

"We had a whole heap of dolphins come up and start jumping around the boat," Mr Swaine said.
"One came right up next to the boat and was just looking at us.
"It was inquisitive, trying to trying to figure out what what these two idiots are doing, not quite the middle of the ocean but, a long way out at sea on a little Hobie Cat."

A 'magical place'

Mr Swaine said staying calm — with a sense of humour — enabled the pair to make good decisions and arrive at their destination safely.

"We came on the inside of Great Keppel and all of a sudden the wind stopped, the swell stopped and it was just this magical place," he said.

Mike Swaine says if it wasn't for COVID-19, his Queensland coastal adventure wouldn't have happened.

"We pulled up and this guy came down and he's like, 'Oh, where are you from?' and we said 'the Sunshine Coast' and he just thought we're all having a joke.
"He was really surprised. I think we were equally surprised that we actually made it."

Mr Swaine said that the expedition took its toll.
"[It was] hard on the body, I have blistered lips and hands, constant fear in your mind — particularly on a stretch with land barely visible but [it was] totally, absolutely worth it," he said.

After capturing most of the Australian coastline from the air, Swaine wanted to explore on the ground.(Supplied: Mike Swaine)

Mr Swaine said after capturing the coastline from the air for nearly 20 years, being able to experience it at ground level lived up to his expectation.

"People would travel all over the world to go to beautiful places," Mr Swaine said.
"We live in the most beautiful place in the world whether it's on the Sunny Coast or whether it's the entire coast — COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to explore our coastline."

Links : 

• ABC : Meet the families trading winter for Fiji's sunny shores despite coronavirus / 'We are like coronavirus refugees': Sailors happy to be stranded in Tasmania / A tale of two yachts: Sailors in SE Asia make different pandemic choices