More than where the wind blows
An Emapsite coastal GIS satellite image.
Decisions relating to wind farm construction aren’t all about the geography or wind resource.
What is now being thought of as ‘location intelligence’ also takes in how the personnel and ships interact with their physical environment.
James Cutler of Emapsite explained that the true value of location, the X and Y, the latitude and longitude, isn’t just about the ‘hard location’ of what lies on the bottom of the sea or where the wind blows. It concerns the ability to process, manage and share different kinds of information relating to a particular point or wider geographic area.
“It’s about overlapping and interacting criteria, said Mr Cutler. “For example, if you have an installation vessel and divers, it would be useful to be able to predict more about the operational windows than simple tidal charts allow for.
“What Emapsite gives you is a bit like a ready made cake of geographic and infrastructure data, to which you can add your own ‘topping’, such as an overlay of ship movements and environmental factors. This gives you the ability to keep a constant eye on what’s happening, from both a health and safety and business angle.”
Mr Cutler explained that in the construction phase of an offshore farm for example, a map interface, be it a geobrowser such as Google or Bing, or a more traditional desktop geographic information system (GIS) can help engineers and project managers to monitor and track activities as they happen on and under the sea. “They need some way of tracking personnel as they cross vessels and installations, as well as looking at the immediate, local circumstances. Map based visualisation is a very powerful medium by which to monitor such movements.”
The beauty of combining GIS and the internet is that different layers of information can be fed in to multiple workstations and mobile units, giving different users an up to date picture of weather conditions, wind speed, boat movements, wave heights and so on. All the information is captured, referenced, connected, analysed and stored online.
GIS involves software tools that facilitate the creation, manipulation and presentation of digital maps and other data from multiple sources. They are increasingly database driven so it’s not just about what is displayed on screen. There are other uses, such as triggering alarms or signals.
Mr Cutler added, “In dynamic environments such as offshore engineering, it is critical for compliance and other reasons to alert changing rosters of personnel as to new circumstances. Such 'views' of the site necessitate collation, storage, retrieval and visualisation of data across time and space. It’s a huge challenge for marine organisations to know how to hold all the data together.”
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