ASA in the News

2007

The Providence Journal - April 1, 2007

RI Firm Credited in Rescue

By Bruce Landis, Journal Staff Writer

ASA was credited for their part in developing the newly deployed SAROPS US Coast Guard Search & Rescue system, which proved successful in the rescue of a cruise ship man adrift at sea.

Computer software developed by a band of URI grads at Applied Science Associates, of Narragansett, helps track a cruise ship passenger who had fallen overboard.


USCG rescue

You fall overboard from your cruise ship, splash into the ocean off South Florida, and surface only to watch the ship sail on.

You’re in the Gulf Stream, so the water’s moving, maybe 2 knots, maybe 6. Over 8 hours, you might travel 16 miles, or 48 miles, generally toward the north.

Further complicating things for searchers, the waves are 4 to 6 feet high. Very quickly, you can see the ship only when you’re at the top of a wave. That means that somebody searching for your head in the water can see you only then, too.

That’s what happened to an Orlando, Fla., man after midnight March 16 about 30 miles east of Fort Lauderdale. The Coast Guard pulled Michael Mankamyer, 35, out of the water about 8 hours later and 15 miles away, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Dana Warr. He was treated for mild hypothermia.

The Coast Guard attributed the success to the skill and luck of the searchers — and to new search software that is partly the work of a Narragansett company called Applied Science Associates and headed by a half-dozen University of Rhode Island graduates.

ASA’s software extracts meaning from masses of weather, ocean current and other data. Besides floating people, the search software has helped find everything from missing fishing boats to cargo containers lost overboard from ships, ASA’s chief executive officer, Eoin Howlett, said.

Helping to find drifting objects isn’t the only trick ASA’s software does. Some of the company’s other packages include:

  • AIRMAP, which models the dispersion in the atmosphere of chemicals and biological agents.

  • CHEMMAP, which predicts, in three dimensions, the “trajectory, fate, impacts and biological effects” of a variety of chemicals after they are spilled.

  • OILMAP, which predicts the movement of spilled oil. Howlett said it was used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the 1996 North Cape oil spill in Rhode Island Sound.

  • MUDMAP, the package with the catchiest name, predicts the movement of drilling mud, the material injected into undersea oil-drilling equipment to lubricate it, and drill cuttings, the debris from drilling.

    • ASA was born in the late 1970s when two of its founders, Malcolm Spaulding, a professor in the URI Ocean Engineering Department, and Craig Swanson, a graduate student, were working on numerical environmental models. It occurred to them that the models might be useful in assessing the environmental impact of coastal development activities — useful enough to market.

    Now the company also has offices in Australia and Brazil and software all over the world. Howlett said its U.S. operation has annual revenue of about $5 million — “not bad for a little company.”

    The search software, called SARMAP, which Howlett said is used from Spain to New Zealand, takes the best available starting position for the object sought and then uses weather, current and other data to predict where it will go. In Mankamyer’s case, the Coast Guard had an excellent starting point. Warr said the Coast Guard knew about the incident in about 15 minutes and, within an hour, had an air-dropped buoy in the water, helping to track drift.

    The hardest thing to find is a “PIW,” which is search-and-rescue talk for a person in the water. Other things drift differently, affected to varying degrees by wind and current. ASA keeps a database of information about that third key element in predicting location, the characteristics of the object itself.

    Howlett said ASA keeps the characteristics of upward of 60 variations. For example, a person in the water drifts differently from a person in the water in a survival suit. A life raft is affected more by the wind than a person in the water, which is affected more by the current. The system distinguishes between a drifting sailboat with a sail up and one without, and between a boat that’s right side up and one that has capsized. The capsized one, its smooth bottom exposed, catches the wind less.

    A demonstration on the company’s Web site depicts six objects: three life rafts and three people that start at one point and then diverge. Part of their motion is back and forth, Howlett said, to account for the changing tide.

    SAROPS simulation

    The software generates a search area where the target is most likely to be, which expands over time. On a more sophisticated level, it recommends how searchers should cover the search area. A plane normally flies parallel legs from one end of the search area to the other, working its way across it. The ASA software recommends how close together those legs should be to make spotting the target more likely.

    Sometimes the trail is days old, for example when a fishing boat hasn’t been heard from for days and then is thought lost. Howlett said searchers then backtrack through past data to try to estimate where the boat, or its crew, might have been when it got into trouble and where it might have drifted afterward.

    In that sort of situation, he said, “You end up with a big search area.”

    “The ocean’s a very complicated place,” he said.




    © 2009 Applied Science Associates, Inc.