A Visibility Risk Assessment Tool for Maritime Operations
AOS is developing a risk assessment tool for maritime operations incorporating machine learning-informed improved visibility forecasts.
Overview of the project
Services:
- Weather Forecasting
- Risk Assessments
- Decision-aiding Tools
Visibility is a critical factor in maritime operations, impacted by various atmospheric conditions such as fog, heavy drizzle, large waves and spray under strong wind conditions, and other obstructions. Operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models traditionally do not take into account variables beyond temperature, moisture, and aerosol concentrations (when available), and often struggle to accurately forecast visibility due to the complexity of atmospheric dynamics at the small scales and high vertical resolution required near the surface. Applied Ocean Sciences (AOS) proposes developing a visibility forecast method that improves upon all of these by incorporating additional environmental fields and using machine learning techniques to train forecasts. In addition, AOS is developing a reduced visibility risk assessment tool produced by our proprietary risk assessment codes (RACs), incorporating these expanded and improved visibility forecasts. Our risk assessment tool will provide forecasts of visibility risk data that can be integrated with customers’ unique systems as well as be accessed as maps through a web-based UI.
Reduced visibility conditions impact maritime operations via decreased speed and safety in movement of commercial fleets, and increased costs through poor fuel load planning and restrictions of harbor operations. Inclement weather costs the shipping and transportation industry more than $3.5 billion each year, with hundreds of millions of dollars lost annually due to shipping transit delays alone. Visibility at sea also impacts the safety of small fishing and recreational boats, which can have smaller radar footprints if the low visibility overlaps with sea states inducing higher radar clutter. The global COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the indispensable role of maritime shipping in the supply chain; therefore, decreasing its associative cost and risk are of the utmost importance.
Challenge
One of the main challenges faced to date is obtaining observational validation data for visibility forecasts.
Solution
In addition to traditional observational visibility datasets, we are working on data scraping and image processing publicly available images, as well as building our own cameras to install (with permission) and process the resulting images, for visibility conditions to increase our validation dataset in key areas of interest.
Results
Stay tuned.
