Real-Time Network of Weather and Ocean Stations: Public-Private Partnership on In-Situ Measurements in the Gulf of Guinea

Autor: Valerie Quiniou-Ramus, Jean-Baptiste Cohuet, Pascal Venzac, Rémi Estival
Rok vydání: 2013
Předmět:
Zdroj: Volume 5: Ocean Engineering.
DOI: 10.1115/omae2013-10903
Popis: Monitoring of meteorological or/and oceanographic conditions is done on many Oil & Gas platforms offshore West and Central Africa (from Nigeria to Angola), but it is often only used in real-time and not necessarily archived on a hard-drive, or it is protected by each company’s IT firewalls thus making it difficult to send the information to the “outer world”. In 2010, TOTAL Oil & Gas Operator launched a project to give remote and public access to this real-time wind, current and also wave or other meteorological / oceanographic (“metocean”) data. The objectives of this initiative were multiple: • Improve weather and ocean hindcasts and forecasts, which will be beneficial to all Oil & Gas operations in Africa, • Help feed a database for future O&G developments; • Enable design checks after ∼1 year of operation; • Serve as a “black box” in case of an incident which could be due to environment; • Help feed or validate ocean and oil spill drift forecast in case of emergency; • Contribute to the international effort of monitoring the oceans in the long term (operational oceanography, climate change, etc.); • Encourage capacity building in Africa by supporting development and maintenance of technical solutions to reach objectives In 2013, with the support of the French Meteorological Office Météo-France, the data from half a dozen platforms offshore Nigeria, Congo and Angola will be available on the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Global Telecommunication System (GTS). This paper will present the type of metocean stations that are part of this network “MODANET”, the IT architecture that was selected to send it out of the Company’s network, the quality control undertaken by Meteo France before sending it to the GTS, and future possible use of the data that are envisaged.
Databáze: OpenAIRE