1. Introduction
The Norwegian Joint Rescue Coordination Centres
(JRCC) handle more than 1500 maritime incidents each
year in the Norwegian Sea and surrounding waters. Of
these incidents, a substantial part involves both search
and rescue1 (SAR)2
. This was the motivation for
developing an operational search and rescue model
that could be initiated with a minimum of information
and that would rapidly return search areas based on
prognoses of wind and surface currents.
Maritime search and rescue is essentially about
estimating a search area by quantifying a number of
unknowns (the last known position, the object type and
the wind, sea state, and currents affecting the object),
then compute the evolution of the search area with time
and rapidly deploy search and rescue units (SRU) in the
search area. This puts certain constraints on the model.
First, the degrees of freedom must be limited to allow
easy operation. This means that uncertainty about the
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Marine Systems 69 (2008) 99–113
www.elsevier.com/locate/jmarsys
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: oyvind.breivik@met.no (Ø. Breivik). 1 Source: the official statistics of the Norwegian RCC, 2001. 2 Not to be confused with synthetic aperture radar, also commonly
referred to as SAR.
0924-7963/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmarsys.2007.02.010
last known position and assumptions on the shape of the
object must be tractable for operational users in real time
applications. Second, environmental data (wind and
current fields, either prognostic, observed or climatological)
must be available in real time and third, the
model must be fast enough to make it an instrument for
operative search area planning.