Project seeks more precision with data on sea conditions

The Wavesentry project will tap into the existing Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), including GPS, to gather sea-state data then integrate it with information from buoys and ships.

The impetus of the project comes from the fact that many offshore operations do not have sufficient information on existing sea states in the moments before they actually set out.

‘There are some high-spec radar satellites around made by NASA and ESA that take very good, accurate measurements, but there’s only a few of them and there are large parts of the ocean that are just not covered most of time,’ said Martin Unwin of SSTL, the principal engineer on the project. ‘If you picked an individual spot in the ocean, within two hours the sea state could be very different to what it was before and that’s just the temporal domain; likewise in the spatial domain if you move from one spot to another one 50km away, again the sea state could be very different.’