by Tim J. Nohara NOT FOR REPRODUCTION Affordable, multi-mission radar surveillance networks for marine and port security Introduction The events of September 11, 2001, have focused the efforts of various public and private North American stakeholders on homeland security. Identified threats include terrorist or criminal activities, accidents, or natural disasters. Threats that occur on or alongside water are particularly challenging because waterways are generally open to recreational and commercial vessels. Protecting people and property from such threats requires situational awareness that would provide authorities and citizens with timely information to prevent, respond to, and mitigate them. Affordably providing the required situational awareness to enhance marine and port security is the subject of this paper. Terrorist or criminal activities can be carried out using low-flying general aviation aircraft and vessels of all sizes from large container ships down to zodiacs and sea-doos. When the water is frozen over, snow-mobiles and vehicles add to the target mix. Awareness of what these targets are doing at any given time and understanding whether particular target behaviour is suspicious and requires closer examination is what we mean by situational awareness. Targets intending to commit a crime will not generally abide by rules requiring them to communicate their whereabouts to authorities, or carry mandatory reporting devices. Therefore, radar is needed, which is the accepted gold-standard for all weather, day/ night surveillance of uncooperative targets. The temporal and spatial dimensions of the problem at hand are far more demanding than we have been used to in conflicts abroad. Take Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009 Maritime and Port Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 29
a military campaign, for example, which is typically confined to one or more regions, and which (hopefully) is limited in time from a few weeks to a few years. Situational awareness there involves expensive, high-performance radar, communication, and imaging systems operated by highly trained personnel. In many cases, the targets are presumed to be either friend or foe. As friends are known (they communicate a recognized ID to the system), identifying targets of interest is made easier. Now consider the temporal and spatial dimensions for homeland marine and port security. From a temporal standpoint, threats can occur any time, day or night, and are infrequent, which means situational awareness is needed 24/7/365. Furthermore, because threats can unfold very quickly on the order of seconds (e.g. a vessel crosses a narrow waterway such as the St. Lawrence River and lands on the shoreline of another country violating an international border, or a vessel enters a marine exclusion zone on the waterside of a nuclear power plant on Lake Ontario), persistent surveillance is needed to provide adequate situational awareness. Earth imaging satellites such as Radarsat 2 take about 100 minutes between orbits and only revisit a particular location on the earth once every 24 hours. Launching a large constellation of satellites to provide continuous coverage of the homeland is extremely expensive. From a spatial perspective, threats can occur anywhere across our vast waterways. Canada Figure 1: To achieve wide-area surveillance of vast regions of water, each radar site is configured as a radar node on a network. has the longest coastline in the world spanning over 200,000 km and the world s coastlines total 356,000 km [CIA World Factbook]. Worldwide, commercially navigated waterways are estimated at over 670,000 km. North American international borders along waterways exceed 6,000 km [United States Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Report RS21729] and there are over 20,000 km of actively maintained commercial inland and intra-coastal waterways [United States Army Corps of Engineers]. The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System alone spans 3,700 km in length bringing goods to/from dozens of ports with an international border running through it, and serving an area of North America that is home to about two-thirds of Canada s population and industries, and one-quarter of the United States. While a fleet of aircraft platforms are capable of providing persistent surveillance over a particular area, many new aircraft, sensors, and trained crews would be needed to cover this vast expanse of waterways continuously, which again would be unaffordable in most cases. While the spatial and temporal demands associated with providing continuous situational awareness for marine and port security are so challenging, there is one significant advantage over military campaigns that ought to be fully exploited. The fact that we are talking about security of the homeland means that we can use much more affordable ground-based solutions since we govern the lands and waterways on which they would be deployed. Furthermore, in many cases at least, we can leverage existing infrastructure (e.g. roads, power, voice, and data communications). If we can design and deploy security solutions to also support non-security applications, then these investments can accrue to other sectors of the economy as well. 30 The Journal of Ocean Technology Essays Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009
Building situational awareness solutions to accommodate multiple applications that could benefit other sectors of the economy may seem at first glance as too onerous a requirement to place on such systems, but closer examination reveals that this is not the case for two reasons. First, open service oriented architectures are being demanded more and more for new government-funded systems, and commercialoff-the-shelf (COTS) technologies such as Web 2.0 make this an affordable reality from an engineering perspective. Second, and more importantly, when one considers the number of different agencies involved in homeland security and their various information needs concerning situational awareness, their user requirements will dictate a secure but flexible, service oriented approach in any event, for technical feasibility and affordability. Authorities in Canada include the Department of National Defense (Navy), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada Border Services Agency, Transport Canada, Canadian Coast Guard, Fisheries and Oceans, Provincial Police, Regional Police, and Port Authorities, not to mention their United States counterparts on the other side of the invisible water border. In addition, industrial facilities will also be involved in waterside security and critical infrastructure protection. Given the large number of stakeholders, and the fact that a roll-out of situational awareness solutions will be incremental, flexibility, information sharing (at some level), and interoperability are not luxuries but rather necessities. With this background, we have motivated the need for a ground-based, integrated network of digital marine radars to provide the required primary situational awareness over such vast waterways. The system includes a target information subsystem with a service oriented architecture and target analytics in support of multiple missions and applications, flexibility, and growth. System Description and Architecture The system information provided in the sequel relates to the Accipiter family of radar products and systems. Additional technical information can be found at www.accipiterradar.com. Figure 2: Marine radar transceiver integrated with cameras for target identification. Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009 Maritime and Port Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 31
Copyright Figure 3: Accipiter Journal of radar Ocean mounted Technology on small 2009 tower.
Having established the need for an affordable, integrated network of ground-based, digital surveillance radars to provide wide-area, multimission situational awareness for marine and port security, we now turn our attention to the major system components and architecture. A single shore-mounted radar can survey hundreds of square kilometres of water surface as well as the airspace above for low-flyers. COTS marine radars and antennas are very inexpensive and have been shown to provide good small-target tracking performance when coupled with an Accipiter Digital Radar Processor (DRP). Figure 2 illustrates the marine radar scanner, coupled with cameras, that can be steered to a selected target by operators for identification purposes. The DRP carries out clutter suppression, detection, and tracking to extract target information (i.e. latitude, longitude, speed, heading, intensity, date, time, radar number, ID, etc.) typically every couple of seconds. out to several tens of kilometres is affordably achieved. By placing radars on both sides of even large inland lakes such as the Great Lakes, full coverage is achievable. Tethered Aerostats are highly persistent and affordable (compared to airborne platforms), and can hover at altitudes from 3,000 feet to 18,000 feet (depending on the size of the Aerostat), requiring only limited downtime (a few hours each month). They are ideal for long-range, coastal applications where coverage out to 300 km is achievable. Applications include monitoring of the Figure 4: Accipiter radar mounted on Aerostat. The radar scanner can be mounted on a variety of platforms depending on the lineof-site coverage requirements needed for that particular radar. Platforms range from small towers approximately 100 in height such as the one shown in Figure 3 to tethered Aerostats such as that shown in Figure 4, which can fly at a variety of altitudes. Radars can also be mounted on roof-tops or on a hill, and existing radars such as those used along controlled waterways or for vessel traffic services can be directly integrated with a DRP. Tower mounted radars are ideal for coverage along waterways and lakes where line of sight Exclusive Economic Zone. This solution also offers several advantages over ground based surface wave radars including a 100- fold improvement in resolution, a 10-fold improvement in target update rate, no issues with co-channel interference, and a much smaller footprint on the ground making real estate acquisition more manageable. To achieve wide-area surveillance of vast regions of water for marine and port security, each radar site is configured as a radar node (RN) in a network as shown in Figure 1. The DRP associated with each RN is connected Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009 Maritime and Port Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 33
Figure 5: Radar operations centre or central monitoring site. to a TCP/IP network along with other RNs. Tower-based RNs might be spaced 10 to 15 km apart while Aerostat RNs would be spaced much further. Each RN provides a local area of coverage as illustrated in Figure 1, and adjacent RNs are located so that coverage areas overlap to provide complete coverage. Mobile RNs (also shown in Figure 1) can be used as gap fillers and connect to the network to provide additional coverage. The radar network behaves as shown in Figure 1. A radar data server (RDS) also on the network is located at a central monitoring site such as that shown in Figure 5. The RDS provides connectivity between the RNs and the remote users of the target information. The RDS allows complete target information to be streamed to it from any networked RN. The target information is low-bandwidth, and thus is easily distributed over standard networks. The target information is immediately stored for subsequent real-time or historical access. All data are stored efficiently in a robust industry-standard Structured Query Language database (the Track Database) which is at the heart of the RDS. A radar fusion engine fuses tracks common to radars with overlapping coverage. Multiple users and applications are allowed to access the data in parallel, according to their specific requirements, for real-time viewing and analysis. Specific portions of the integrated target information are distributed to the remote users. Different users have different needs and privileges, and thus are given appropriate portions of the data. Users connect to the RDS using client applications such as TrackViewer Workstations, Google Earth displays, Web services, etc. Similar interfaces can also be used to make integration with third party common operating picture systems straight forward. Applications and Examples The radar surveillance networks described above can simultaneously provide situational awareness for a variety of missions relating to marine and port security. These include: 34 The Journal of Ocean Technology Essays Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009
Law enforcement Critical infrastructure protection Waterside security Border enforcement Search and rescue Shipping and traffic management Natural disaster and accident management Since 9/11, increased demands have been placed on underresourced law enforcement marine units to provide enhanced security. Figure 6 shows a police patrol at the Port of Hamilton. Track displays like the one shown in Figure 7 in the hands of the dispatcher, or sent directly to the patrol vessel, can act as a force multiplier, giving officers better awareness of vessel location, course, and speed. This is particularly important at night, or when in pursuit of a vessel beyond line of sight, as this information enhances officer safety. Figure 6: Law enforcement on patrol in Port of Hamilton. Historical target information can be used to automatically generate traffic patterns in support of actionable intelligence. For example, if a new pattern is observed at night regularly going from one location to another, further investigation may be warranted. The same may be true for a short rendezvous observed in the middle of a lake. Critical infrastructure includes hydro-electric and nuclear power plants, chemical storage facilities, and offshore oil production facilities, all which tend to be located on or alongside Figure 7: Real-time vessel track display in Port of Hamilton. bodies of open water. These sites provide attractive targets for terrorist attacks due to their easy access and the danger they would bring to the public, including the disruption of key services. Radar networks can also assist here by providing continuous, unattended surveillance of marine exclusion zones (MEZ) established around each facility. If certain targets are detected approaching or loitering around these MEZs, automated alerts can be Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009 Maritime and Port Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 35
of 1812 sit on the Lake s bottom, and are protected from disturbance from divers by such a radar. Automated alerts are issued directly to marine units when suspicious target behaviour is detected near the site. City of Hamilton Figure 8: Figurehead on the Hamilton shipwreck. The same type of automatic alerting can be used by various industrial facilities located waterside. The same radar network that provides overall situational awareness for a port (Figure 7) can also allow individual industrial facilities to access the target information remotely and use their own software to set alerts of interest to them alone. Radar displays could be located in their own security rooms giving existing security guards increased awareness. Their own radar display could also be integrated with daytime and night-time cameras to provide identification when alerted of suspicious activity. ASI Group Figure 9: Figurehead on the Scourge shipwreck. issued by email, text message, or pager to marine units and facility personnel so that they can respond accordingly. This same kind of unattended alerting can be used for other marine or port security applications. For example, in the middle of Lake Ontario is a National Historic site known as the Hamilton (Figure 8) and the Scourge (Figure 9). Vessels that sank during the War Border enforcement applications can also benefit significantly. Border enforcement officials can have their own remote displays and tailor them for automatic alerts when border crossings occur, as shown in Figure 10. Historical target information can also be analysed to generate traffic patterns around borders, and to quantify hot spots that may justify further attention. Individual targets crossing a border can be monitored and enforcement officials radioed if they do not follow reporting protocols. An unexpected benefit of multi-mission radar networks is reduced search time and hence reduced cost in marine search and rescue 36 The Journal of Ocean Technology Essays Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009
operations. Coast Guard personnel often respond to calls from a recreational vessel which has lost its way back to shore, or by a loved one worried that the vessel may have run into trouble. Expensive, ship-based, and airborne search time and cost can be reduced significantly by using information from the caller (e.g. location and time when vessel left shore, last known location/time, etc.) and the radar system s rapid reply capabilities to narrow down the likely target whereabouts allowing for a much more focused search. The same radar replay capabilities can be used in all applications, especially for investigative, reporting, and prosecution purposes. The efficient storage of target information means that it can be kept for all time. There is no reason to ever delete it. Shipping companies and traffic managers will also find the target information useful. Realtime displays as well as historical information can be useful for planning and training. The small vessel traffic information provided by the system will be particular useful as there is no other way to get this information since small vessels do not carry automatic identification system transponders. Finally, during major accidents (e.g. a chemical or oil spill) or natural disaster, marine and port situational awareness will be valuable for a variety of officials at regional, provincial/state, and federal emergency operations centres. Access to traffic information from multimission radar networks will be of tremendous value to all those coordinating relief efforts. Ongoing Cooperation Various government, law enforcement, and private stakeholders continue to make significant contributions towards the development and assessment of affordable surveillance networks for marine and port security applications. Such efforts are necessary to fully assess and exploit system capabilities in operational environments and to ensure suitable integration and interoperability in support of diverse user requirements. A recent collaboration with the RCMP that Accipiter is proud to be part of on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River was announced in April 2009 by the Canadian Ministers of National Defence (Honourable Peter MacKay) and Public Safety (Honourable Peter Van Loan). This project, funded under the Public Security Technical Program and managed by Figure 10: Vessel crossing from Canada to the United States and automatic border alert issued. Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009 Maritime and Port Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2009 37
Defence Research Development Canada, seeks to advance Canada s capability to prevent and prepare for safety and security threats, whether caused by terrorist or criminal activity, accident, or natural disaster. Accipiter is privileged to work alongside those men and women whose mission is to help keep the general public safe and secure on and around our waterways. While past efforts have clearly demonstrated affordable products providing flexible, all-weather, day/night surveillance and target information, current and future efforts will further develop and refine concepts of operation in support of particular stakeholder missions and move towards full scale deployments. u Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the efforts of Accipiter staff members, as well as program partners TCOM, L.P., ASI Group, the City of Hamilton, and GTS who contributed significantly to some of the systems or examples used herein. Dr. Tim J. Nohara is the President and CEO of Accipiter Radar. Formerly with Raytheon, in 1994 he began assembling a world-class team of radar professionals to pioneer affordable security radar networks now in use by a growing number of governments, law enforcement agencies, port authorities, and corporations around the world. Dr. Nohara received B.Eng, M.Eng and Ph.D degrees from McMaster University, where he specialized in radar. He is a licensed professional engineer, and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the Professional Engineers of Ontario. He has contributed to textbooks and authored numerous peer-reviewed technical publications, reports, and patents in radar. 38 The Journal of Ocean Technology Essays Copyright Journal of Ocean Technology 2009