Coastal Radar WERA, a tool for Search and Rescue and oil spill management

The HF-Coastal Radar “WERA” is a shore based remote sensing system to monitor ocean surface currents, waves and wind direction. This very reliable long range and high resolution monitoring system based on short radio wave radar technology. Due to the outstanding accuracy WERA can provide very valuable data to be assimilated into hydrographic models. In case of accidents in a distance of up to 200 km off the coast the real-time ocean surface current data can help Search and Rescue (SAR) operators. Presently, SAR tools are based on hydro-dynamical and atmospheric models to provide hindcast and forecast situations. Even if these oceanic numerical models are efficient to produce instantaneous maps of currents, the accuracy of derived Lagrangian trajectories often is not sufficient for search and rescue purposes. To improve these numerical models by means of realtime data it is essential that the quality of the assimilated data is very high and reliable. For this reason long term comparisons with buoy data for ground truthing and statistical analysis were carried out for more than two years. The resulting data availability (98,7 %) is outstanding and the data quality is as good as buoy data.