This article is from page 9 of the 2011-11-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 9 JPG
A REVOLUTIONARY new radar system will dramatically increase the speed at which emergency services can find people lost off the coast of north Clare.
The coastal radar system, which is the first of its kind anywhere on the European Atlantic coast, will give minute-by-minute analysis of the speed and direction of currents off the north Clare coast.
The radar, which was officially launched last week by the Ryan Institute at NUI, Galway, covers a large area of sea from Fanore to Ballyvaughan and up along the Clare and Galway coastline to Galway City.
“The new radar can give us accurate current speeds and direction every 300 metres along the coast of north Clare,” said Dr Mike Hartnett of the Modelling and Informatics Group in the Ryan Institute.
“Over the years we have helped the Gardaí and the Doolin Coastguard with different computer models of the area. If they can give us a place and time where someone fell into the water we can now give them a very accurate assessment as to where they might have gone.”
The information from the new ra- dar scheme will be available live online so the emergency services will be able to access it in an emergency situation and can use it to determine where best to look.
“This will give us actual real-time date which can be used for a lot of things like sailing, ferry services and other waters users but when we feed that data into a computer model we will be able to predict the future movements of objects in the water very accurately,” continued Dr Harnett.
“One of the main things that our computer model does in to predict flooding events and this radar will be able to improve how we forecast flooding events. We are in the process now of creating a new computer model for Galway Bay which will predict coastal flooding.
“This is the only radar of it’s kind in this part of the world. There are some radar installations like this in Spain and in parts of the Mediterranean but in a first of its kind for this part of the world.”
The new radar installations and the computer models have been created by The Martin Ryan Institute in NUI, Galway in collaboration with IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin.