Maritime Surveillance

• Ice Concentration
• Stage of development
• Floe size
• Ridging
• Ice Strength

• Assuring safe and efficient maritime navigation in hazardous ice conditions.
• Improved Weather Forecast.
• Supporting Canada's multi-billion maritime trade and northern sovereignty.

"RADARSAT data has proven to be a very cost-effective way of monitoring ice conditions throughout Canadian waters and has enabled us to expand our service and reduce the CIS budgets by about $6 million dollars a year in terms of data acquisition."

B. Ramsay, CIS

Frequent and high-resolution near-surface wind information.

• Improving weather forecasting and warning systems.
• Support to marine operations.
• Site selection for wind farms, oil spill drift information, search and rescue support.

SAR-derived surface wind-speed image at 1-kilometer resolution from a RADARSAT-1 image.

• Detection and mapping of oil spills with minimum width of 100 m.
• Detection and positioning of adjacent ships within the same surveillance swath.
• Concurrent estimates of surface wind vector over ocean.

• Near real-time reports on oil spills.
• Improving Canada's response to the monitoring, containment and clean-up of oil spills.
• Contributing to surveillance efforts of ISTOP.
• Protection of sensitive coastal zone from environmental pollution.

"Availability of RADARSAT-1 data is the biggest technological blessing to the peaople to counter this large scale disaster."

Makoto Higashi, General Manager, Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan

• Detect ships >= 25m length in up to sea state 5.
• Detecting vessels > 100 tonns in up to sea state 5.
• Detection of illegal fishing by foreign vessels in Canadian waters.

• Protection of fisheries against over-exploitation and illegal shipping.
• Enhanced maritime domain awareness of Canada's coasts and their approaches.
• Improved security and support to sovereighty.

RADARSAT-1's capability to detect ships has enebled it to become a valuable resource for maritime surveillance programs.