• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Many Islands; north slope; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.632.2104; http://spie.org/documents/Newsroom/Imported/1844/1844_6341_0_2009-11-24.pdf

Low-power radar stations enhancemaritime-domain awareness Pierre Flament and Roy Wilkens A new research center is developing high-frequency Doppler radar for mapping and surveillance of islands and remote locations. High-frequency Doppler radar (HFDR) has been used by the coastal oceanography community for several decades to map ocean currents and waves several hundred kilometers from shore.1 HFDR information can be crucial for both search-and-rescue missions and tracking of pollution plumes from acciden-tal spills. In addition, new research is promoting the technology as an effective means to track large ships, small boats, and low-flying aircraft around coastal waters, which is essential for the effective surveillance of entire coastlines. Low-cost, low-power, autonomous HFDR stations are needed for operations in island and other remote environments (see Figure 1). In recent years, data from these stations have increas-ingly been integrated into maritime-domain awareness (MDA) programs. Islands present special challenges in this context because of their extensive, convoluted coastlines and remote locations. A mountainous island only 30km across may pos-sess more than 90km of coastline, yet might require four or five HFDR installations to cover all approaches. Many islands also lack the modern infrastructure necessary to power such stations and transfer data for real-time processing. Similar problems exist for locations such as Alaska’s North Slope. Alaska accounts for roughly half of the US coastline and large areas are affected by the presence of seasonal Arctic sea ice. The thinning and retreating ice continues to expose larger stretches of Alaska’s ice-locked coast to industrial activities and maritime traffic. Oil and gas development is advancing into coastal waters, which introduces significant risks of oil spills in one of the most extreme and challenging ocean environments in the world.