Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the
European Space Agency, the French Ifremer and many others.
The goal of Search And Rescue (SAR) in these scenarios is to use any available information such
as “mayday”, current direction, wind direction and observations from rescue vehicles and find and
rescue the target. Behind any SAR operation there has to be a well-established and coordinated system
that collects and shares information before and during the operations and performs simulations of the
possible path of the search target.
This paper gives an overview on the emergency operations at sea, considering the cases when an
alert will activate the procedures (section 2) and the evolution to reach a strengthened and more
standardized approach (section 3). The development of a forecast computational system to support
emergency operations in the Portuguese coasts is described in section 4. Finally some consideration on
the importance of a robust computational and information system in the crucial objective of reducing
the time of intervention with a successful result will be highlighted in section 5.