Port Fog Monitoring and Early Warning
Background & Requirements
Marine operating conditions change rapidly. Under extreme harsh weather, vessels are often unable to berth at ports or offshore platforms. For port authorities, sea fog ranks among the most critical marine hazardous weather and poses a major threat to navigation safety. Sea fog significantly reduces horizontal visibility in coastal waters, preventing vessels from identifying navigation beacons and greatly increasing the risks of yawing, reef collision, stranding and even ship collisions that lead to maritime accidents.
Current understanding of sea fog distribution mainly relies on observations from coastal stations, ships and buoys. However, such data is scarce, insufficiently representative and unstable in quality, resulting in a long-term lack of comprehensive and accurate knowledge of sea fog spatial distribution.
Solution Overview
Visibility lidar can be deployed on islands, at ports, or at high-altitude locations, facing key areas such as shipping lanes and sea surfaces. Through fixed-elevation horizontal scanning, it acquires real-time visibility distribution within the scanning area. The sea fog monitoring, early warning and forecasting system displays 0°–360° visibility pseudo-color images in PPI mode and superimposes the data on GIS maps to intuitively present marine visibility conditions. It automatically triggers threshold alarms for low-visibility events in accordance with meteorological service standards.
Lidar Network Observation
Joint Observation of Lidar and Camera
Measurement Effect
During the Spring Festival of 2018, persistent sea fog caused multi-day strait navigation suspensions, severely disrupting maritime traffic and stranding 400,000 tourists and returning passengers in Hainan. To secure maritime transportation during the 2019 Spring Festival, three visibility lidars were deployed at Xuwen Haian Port, Hainan Xiuying Port and Xinhai Port respectively, effectively safeguarding shipping navigation safety.
