COOLroom Called to Action by the Coast Guard

On Friday, January 31, 2003, a ship in distress off Cape Lookout, North Carolina, was successfully evacuated of all personnel.  Even though all lives in immediate danger were saved, the Coast Guard was left with a problem.  The abandoned ship was adrift. They now had to keep track of a pilotless ship so that it did not pose a threat to others.

At 4:00 pm on Friday afternoon, the Coast Guard called the COOLroom.  Weather was bad over the drifter, and it was expensive to keep aircrafts flying round the clock surveillance missions.  Could the COOLroom provide them with any data to tell them which direction the shift would be drifting, and provide them some relief?

While the usual focus of the COOLroom is New Jersey waters, we do post available observations on on website for other areas.  In fact, some of our most avid users are from North Carolina.  Rutgers scientists gathered in the COOLroom and took a look at the real-time displays. 

The main problem was immediately obvious.  Whether the ship drifted slowly to the south or rapidly to the north was critically dependent on its location relative to the Gulf Stream. As we all knew, the Gulf Stream can come in pretty close to shore off the North Carolina Coasts.  But as the aircraft reported, the entire area was clouded in (see Figure 1), and the satellites can't see through clouds. 

With no satellite guidance, we next thought of our ground based radars.  While these CODAR networks provide updated current maps every hour offshore New Jersey, we knew through our collaborations with the University of North Carolina that their ground based CODAR network was still in the installation phase. We even checked their SABSOON website based out of UNC Chapel Hill, but as expected, their data was concentrated to the south offshore of Georgia (Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, University of Georgia, Savannah, GA).

Our last chance was the ocean drifters.  They are deployed by numerous groups, some government, some private, others academic. But they all have one thing in common.  They all routinely report their position via the NOAA weather satellites to any ground station listening in.  The COOLroom has operated one of these ground stations for over a decade.  In this case, we were listening, and we were plotting the results on the web.  The Coast Guard logged in and had immediate access to the only datasets available in the area.  The plots show the drifting buoys, and the last location of the drifting ship (see Figure 2).

Now that we knew which way the ship would be going, we began to wonder, how could we keep track of it.  The Coast Guard asked, could a buoy with the same transmitters just be dropped on or nearby the ship?  Sure.  We sent them off to Jim Feeney at Horizon Marine.  Jim has been deploying satellite tracked buoys from aircrafts for the oil companies since 1984.  In fact, there was a good possibility that many of the buoys we were looking at were his.

Barely 10 minutes had elapsed, and the phone call with the Coast Guard was over. The Coast Guard knew that they had all the information that was available, and were able to get back to work with a better understanding of their operational environment. The people in the COOLroom settled back into their routine.  They all learned something very important just a few minutes earlier.  You never know when a crisis will occur, or what dataset will be needed.  When called upon, they will have no time to create  something new.  They would have to rely on what is readily and routinely  available.  Not a bad lesson late on a Friday afternoon.