Tenacious Search

Via Ed Lazowska. I edited out some contact info for people since this site is public.

From: Bellingham, James
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:05 PM
To: Ed Lazowska
Subject: RE: Jim Gray search: update form this end

Don’t have anything to add, or at least not anything good to add.

Talked with my friend at the Alaska SAR center, and learned that they
are already working on getting SAR data to someone for the purposes of
supporting the search with Jim. They had had a telecon with the Coast
Guard this morning already. In terms of data, there was a Jan 31 1400
UTC pass over the Farallons & San Francisco approaches which should be
nice. The data has already been downloaded from the satellite. The
next step is that the Canadians process it. They are waiting on a
request from the National Ice Center (which is in charge of govt-to-govt
requests). Once they get that request (which they may have by now) they
will take four hours to process the pass, and will ftp the data to the
National Ice Center, which will then distribute it (perhaps to the CG?).

By the way, the Alaska folks tell me that looking for a boat in the data
will be hard.

…

I’ve also been following up on the HF radar. It can be used for
tracking ships, and is in place around SF Bay
(http://cencalcurrents.org/). Some friends of mine at Naval
Postgraduate School who specialize in HF radar are following up again,
but here is what the first pass of information turned up. HF radar can
indeed be used to track ships, but that is being tested on the east
coast and is not a routine product here yet. But is it available in
archival form? After all, being able to see Jim’s boat track on Sunday
might greatly inform the search. Unfortunately, ships are ‘noise’ for
the primary measurement objective of HF radar (they are used to measure
surface current). Ship signal is apparently stripped from the data
before the data is stored as archiving is currently implemented for the
SF region. As I said, I’m following up this line of inquiry again via
another route, just to be sure. The folks at Naval Postgraduate School
did not seem to rule out the possibility that it might be possible to
find a boat track in the data.

And some more:

From: Bellingham, James
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:29 PM
To: Ed Lazowska
Subject: FW: San Francisco AIS System

There is a tracking system for ships that relies on ship being equipped
with an appropriate transponder/repeater called AIS. Small boats like
sailing boats and fishing vessels are not usually equipped, but large
vessels are.

The SF harbor site link is below.

Archival data from Sunday might be useful, although I would have thought
the Coast Guard would look at this almost right away.

By the way, please feel free to forward my emails to whoever else is
working on finding data & resources.

-Jim

________________________________________________
James G. Bellingham, Ph.D.
Chief Technologist
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

—–Original Message—–
From: Godin, Michael
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:18 PM
To: Bellingham, James
Subject: San Francisco AIS System

Hi Jim,

Here is the Web site of the group that manages AIS data in the SF
region.
https://mxais.sfmx.org/

I’m kicking its tires right now.

Mike

And a bit more

From: Mike Cook
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:36 PM
To: Bellingham, James
Cc: Jeffrey Paduan
Subject: surface currents west of golden gate

Hi Jim,

Jeff Paduan asked me to give you data for the ocean outside the golden
gate. Below is a link to an animation for the time period you are
interested in:

www.cencalcurrents.org/Plots/SFB1/trj/2007_01/
animation_2007_01_29_1000.gif

The file contains a 25 hour animation ending at the time contained in
the file name. So this animation starts on 28 Jan 2007 at 1000 GMT and

ends at 29 Jan 2007 at 1000 GMT. The animation has a frame every 1/2
hour.

If you go to the directory:

www.cencalcurrents.org/Plots/SFB1/trj/2007_01/

You can pick your own animation file. Remember, the file name contains

the ending time of the animation. There are a lot of files in this
directory, just make sure you pick ones that start with animation, not
pred_animation.

One of the 3 codar sites that is in the SF area didn’t contribute to
these animations. Unfortunately it contributes heavily to the region
just outside the golden gate, so the trajectory estimates could be
improved if this data exists. I’m trying to determine if the site was
down, in which case this is probably the best we can do. If it was a
communication problem and the data exists, I’ll remake the animations
for the sunday time frame and let you know they were updated.

Mike Cook
Oceanographer
Naval Postgraduate School

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