Coherent radar for environmental monitoring of ice, waves, and currents for oil and gas operations in the Arctic

The coherent radar project to detect ice and estimate the forces of currents and waves acting on ice. The partners of this project have successfully conducting wave measurement exercises at Lindesnes, Norway. Here wave have the luxury of high antenna mount for the radar and a seasonally strong wave climate. Wave data was collected also with two referece AWACs - regarded as a industry standard in wave measurements. Results from the wave experiment shows good agreement between the radar and reference instruments, which means it is possible to use the radar for wave monitoring. Ice detection studies have been carried out aboard the Research Vessel Lance. Here we were able to mount the coherent radar atop the crows nest, together with three gopro cameras. This provided nearly full azimuthal coverage during two Arctic cruises. Again the results from the coherent radar shows promise in ice detection relative to a standard amplitude radar. The algorithms developed for these tasks are now implemented in Nortek's Seadarq software and running together with a new radar processing unit.

The objective of the project is to develop an early warning system for detecting ice and characterizing the level of threat for oil and gas operations in Arctic regions. The innovative technology, consisting of coherent radar technology and state-of-art s ignal processing software, will be capable of monitoring ice, waves and currents with significantly improved accuracy compared to existing, non-coherent marine radar systems. The consortium partners Nortek (instrumentation), North Atlantic Drilling (offsh ore drilling company), Statoil (oil & gas), Norsk Polarinstitutt (Arctic research) and University of Oslo (numerical modeling) have a genuine commercial and technical interest in succeeding with the new technology as this will improve maritime safety. Th is solution differs from standard radar systems in that it utilizes coherent radar, which provides an enriched data. Coherent radar data allows the use other criteria for small target detection in the presence of substantial background clutter. Ice such as "growlers" and "bergy bits" have a small surface expression relative to their total volume. This stealth characteristic makes them difficult to detect and a serious safety issue for Arctic operations. Coherent radar signal allows to directly estimat e the radial velocity. This is an aid for tracking ice velocity, but the greater benefit is the ability to (a) estimate radial components of surface currents, and (b) estimate wave height. Wave height has historically been challenging to estimate with ra dar, particularly standard marine radars. These new capabilities will become the state of the art for environmental monitoring. To reach this goal much effort will focus on understanding the surface response to radar and identify error sources.Algorithm s for the wave inversion problem and target detection will be developed baseed on a solid understanding of the mechanism. The system will be a software solution that employs the benefits of coherent radar.