Description
The first goal of the proposal is to make available a sea storm warning service covering Portugal’s mainland and autonomous regions at scales compatible with the coastal uses and activities. The service will have the ability to communicate with different data sources and provide detailed daily forecast of meteorology, oceanography and waves. These services may be used to provide advice (and warning) to the navigation, fishing, coastal recreational activities, coastal erosion and flooding. Once the system will be running operational providing daily forecasts for the next days it may be used not only to issue alerts but also to provide high resolution forecasts for the remaining periods. The system may also be used to support to other activities such as providing proper meteo-oceanographic conditions capable to act as the basis for oil spills tracking forecasting system and for the identification of most probable places for fish stocks location.
Summary of project results
Unexpected extreme environmental events can cause serious disruptions and even long-term delays, which may be very costly. The capability of providing user tailored accurate information on the state of the sea and weather conditions may have a direct impact on different coastal operations contributing to reduce costs and improve safety. Apart from daily operations of industries such as ports or aquacultures hydro/meteo information is also relevant in emergencies such as containment of oil spills or other accidents requiring rescue and/or salvage operations. AMOS services enable an efficiency increase in operations management, providing real time information resulting from the integration of forecast and measured data. These services may include information derived from very high resolution weather forecasts, non-public local data, user tailored reports, specific alerts, etc., which may be used to support: • weather forecasting and real time data for harbour’s operations and other coastal facilities such as aquacultures or structures affected by the marine conditions (early warning to adverse weather conditions at specific locations, identification of access windows, etc.); • Support to the response to Environmental Hazards such as oil spills (marine weather conditions, on the fly simulations most probable path of the oil slick, simulation of boom’s deployment, etc.); • Support to coastal discharges (impacts on beach water quality for instance); AMOS enabled to properly structure a set of services which basis already existed before the project but were requiring some systematization to be able to address the requirements of different users and providing it by this way characteristics compatible with a long term sustainability. Although some times the exact quantification of the benefits may not be a straightforward task (especially in which concerns the benefits related with the safety increase) it is a fact that the return in efficiency improvement in operations such as those related with ports or aquacultures may be quite relevant and be translated in some thousands of Euros a year (depending of the dimension of the operation). In practice the recognition by the users of the added value of this information is translated in their willing to pay for the provided services which already represents a relevant share of HIDROMOD’s annual turnover (with optimistic growing perspectives ).
Summary of bilateral results
NAVTOR, the AMOS partner from Norway, has made a “Service Concept” supported by NavStation platform between ship and shore allowing information exchange ship-shore-ship. AMOS project we have extended NavStation capabilities to accept a parallel sources of high resolution meteo-oceanographic data to the main, global source origin from ECMWF. As a result the navigator may upload an AMOS forecast, e.g. wave or surface current, to a given location in NavStation, and this file appears as an “Extended Feature” in the NavStation WX-display menu. These new capabilities have the potential to improve the navigation safety in coastal waters. In the sense that the project funding provided an opportunity of collaboration that, otherwise, would not most probably happened, this bilateral funds contributed effectively to strengthened bilateral relations. The Hidromod-Navtor partnership contributed to provide a potential wider market to the services delivered in the project framework. Hidromod’s market is mostly focused in coastal users (such as ports) while Navtor market is mostly focused in shipping trough the provision of electronic navigation charts and meteo-oceanographic forecasts. Although this is a highly regulated market, and though the construction of a market for on-board AMOS products may not be an easy task, the fact is that this was a unique opportunity to present this kind of services to shipping companies and wake up their interest.