Satellites could one day replace Coast Guard's ice-patrol crews

New London - Coast Guardsmen flying over the North Atlantic Ocean in search of icebergs could be replaced in the future by satellites that can do the same job.

A decade from now, this could dramatically impact a Fort Trumbull-based Coast Guard unit, the International Ice Patrol, which monitors the iceberg danger near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and warns mariners to eliminate the risk of iceberg collision.

If satellites prove to be reliable, the Coast Guard could choose to assign fewer people to the IIP, eliminate the unit altogether or merge it with another agency, such as the National Ice Center.

"Logically, a reduction in force would make sense, but what the numbers would look like and how we move forward, that's in the future and it needs to be studied more thoroughly," said Cmdr. Scott Rogerson, commanding officer of the IIP. "We need to get the satellites in the air, see that they can detect icebergs, and the rest will fall from there."

At the start of the IIP's annual conference, held Wednesday at the Coast Guard Academy, Rogerson outlined a timeline for transitioning to a system of finding icebergs by satellite. The Coast Guard, he said, would continue to do iceberg reconnaissance by plane from 2010 to 2015 as satellite capabilities develop, decreasing the reliance on aircraft for finding icebergs from 2015 to 2020, and using satellites only starting in 2020.

The advantage to satellites is the cost savings, since the Coast Guard would not have to send personnel and aircraft to Newfoundland to locate icebergs. Those assets could then be freed up for other missions.

Satellites are also not prone to some of the problems that affect aircraft, such as grounding due to weather. This past iceberg season, February through July, IIP members found the majority of icebergs by looking out of the plane's windows because a new radar system on the aircraft was not working properly.

This season, some of the planes need major maintenance and will not be available.

"Ten years ago we had the first inclination to do the mission by satellite," Rogerson said. "It has taken longer than anticipated to develop the technology but I'm hopeful for the next decade. If the satellites launched prove as capable as we hope, and if the ice patrol gains access to the imagery, my vision for 2020 seems possible."

The plan, Rogerson said, is still "subject to approval by a lot of people."

Currently there are not enough satellites in orbit to sufficiently cover the area that the IIP monitors, and satellite imagery is not always clear enough to differentiate between ships and icebergs.

The European and Canadian space agencies plan to launch several more satellites in the next five years, which should address the coverage issue, said Pradeep Bobby, a project engineer at C-CORE, a nonprofit company in St. John's, Newfoundland, that analyzes satellite images.

C-CORE plans to use higher resolution data this season to demonstrate that it can single out icebergs, said Bobby, who attended the conference along with representatives from more than a dozen agencies in the United States and Canada. C-CORE and the IIP compare data to see whether the satellites are detecting the icebergs that the IIP crew finds with aircraft.

The 2009 iceberg season was the 11th busiest since 1900, with more than 1,200 icebergs drifting into the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes. Conference attendees said they were concerned that more ships may travel through waters with icebergs for commercial shipping purposes or ecotourism.

Rogerson said he is getting calls from people wanting to know where the icebergs will be in 2012, the centennial of the RMS Titanic's sinking after it struck an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew. But the IIP can't predict that far ahead.

"A Titanic memorial cruise is going to replicate the Titanic journey, hopefully not too precisely," Rogerson said. "I can only hope there won't be icebergs there. There were in 2009 and in 2008. … Not all ships choose to abide by our limits, and one of our concerns is that this is going to be more and more the case."

Luc Desjardins, a forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service, predicted that in the 2010 season there will be about 850 icebergs and possibly a few fragments from a large ice island that broke apart. These fragments are more flat and shallow than icebergs, which means they can travel closer to shore and pose a hazard to the oil industry, he said.

j.grogan@theday.com