Proposals 2005-2006

• Distress Beacon Locating in Inshore Areas - Pilot Project
• Ocean Guardian II SAREX St. Pierre - Fortune Ferry Run
• East Coast Forecast System

Distress Beacon Locating in Inshore Areas - Pilot Project

The use of satellite distress beacons and low-powered person-over-board alerting devices is proliferating within the marine environment. In 2003 the Cospas-Sarsat system detected many activations of beacons and signalling devices within the Canadian SAR Region many of which required a SAR unit to home and locate before conducting the rescue of the distressed persons. 

Although the Cospas-Sarsat system can locate these devises to within 5 miles for 406 MHz transmissions and 20 miles for 121.5 MHz transmissions, there still remains challenges in localizing the source of the transmission. This is further complicated if the transmission is coming from an area with many vessels, such as a harbour. All aircraft and CCG vessels carry fixed homing equipment able to home on 121.5 MHz, however, there are situations where it would be beneficial for personnel to go ashore and continue homing in order to more quickly localize the signal.  

This proposal will trial the use of 6 newly-developed state-of-the-art portable homers, which have been designed to operate in the marine enviornment in areas with a history of high levels of SAR cases requiring in-shore homing of beacons. An historical plot of these SAR cases is provided at the end of this proposal.

Ocean Guardian II SAREX St. Pierre - Fortune Ferry Run

SAREX "Ocean Guardian II" is a multi-jurisdictional search and rescue exercise with maritime and aeronautical components, involving the Canadian Coast Guard, Canadian Forces and International Ferry Operators. A new international SAR Cooperation plan has been devised for the St. Pierre - Fortune Ferries and provides a concept of operations that requires the effective utilization of resources that may be required to respond to a Major Marine Disaster. 

All resources including shore based personnel will participate in a major maritime disaster and the Cooperation Plan will be activated and processes, procedures will be tested to ensure that a timely and coordinated effort will achieve an effective response.  This is a event and the SAR Cooperation Plan has never been activated or exercised and requires this SAREX to examine deficiencies, modifications or any alterations that will result in the benefit of preservation of life at sea or property. 

East Coast Forecast System

This proposal seeks funding from the NIF program to assist to develop a forecasting system for East Coast/part of the Eastern Arctic surface currents model and transfer the data to CCG for ingestion into CANSARP.  

In search and rescue operations, the search area is determined from the best available information at the time of incident.  At the present, we have 3 East Coast models that overlap in some areas and have gaps in other areas.  Search coordinators must make decisions on what model data to use and be aware of model gaps to ensure the best information is used in the search plan.  During a search operation, it is not the time to evaluate and decide which model to use.  The combined East Coast Forecast model will remove the overlaps and gaps and also extend the surface current model to cover an area in the Eastern Arctic around Baffin Bay where we do not have any surface data to assist us.  Real-time data from surface drifters can provide the most critical information required for CANSARP.  But drifter data have limited spatial and temporal coverage: drifters such as SLDMB’s are deployed by aircraft or ships tasked to a SAR operations and in the search area for the operation.  To initially predict a search area for the operation, the controller must rely on models of surface currents to determine where to send units to search.  Once in the search area, the use of SLDMB’s will increase the accuracy of where the units should search.  This is best strategy for predicting surface currents over a large area is to use real-time data (SLDMB’s) in conjunction with model predictions.  

Over the past ten years, scientists at IML, BIO and Dalhousie University have developed ocean circulation models for the Grand Banks, Scotian Shelf and Gulf of St. Lawrence.  Built on the past experience, a large-domain forecast model covering the entire eastern Canadian seaboard with advanced features and more reliable results will be developed in this project.  The model will be calibrated and validated against data from surface drifters deployed by the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Coast Guard College. A forecasting system based on the architecture of an existing system that combines the operations of data transfer, model execution, graphic display and data delivery will be developed. 

This proposal will integrate three East Coast models with an extension to cover areas not included in the existing models.  The computer generated surface currents will be transferred to CCG and ingested into CANSARP for operational use.  The work described in the proposal is closely linked to DFO/Science’s efforts in operational oceanography with the aim to provide information to operational agencies and contribute to the departmental mandate of safe and accessible waterways.  A recently formed DFO working group on regional ocean modeling strongly endorses a seamless solution for short and medium time scale forecasting on Canadian shelf waters.  Two PERD projects have provided funding for research directly related to the objectives of this proposal - investigation of wave effects on surface currents and construction of a numerical grid for a large-domain ocean model.