What do the Coast Guard, dredgers and the oil industry have in common? They all, from time to time, have a need to predict where something’s going in a large body of water.

CIO Guy deWardener recently spoke about ASA’s work and its software to predict the location of drifting objects, which was used earlier this month to rescue a passenger who fell from a cruise ship off the coast of Florida.

PBN: Applied Sciences Associates describes itself as a marine and freshwater environmental modeling company. What does that mean?

deWARDENER: We started out as a bunch of scientists and engineers who provided freshwater and marine modeling services. Since that time, our models have gone through stages of development; our company has gone through stages of development. Right now, we’re in the process of modifying our message, that we’re not only a science, but we’re also a technology solutions company. We’ve always done consulting, but now we’ve gone into simulation and applications development.

PBN: ASA uses multidimensional modeling in its simulations. How does it do that?

deWARDENER: An example of that would be our Oilmap application. We would start with an oil spill. We would obtain environmental parameters like winds and currents and specify the weight of the oil. Our model would take those parameters and predict where the oil or components of the oil would end up in the water – not just on the surface but in the water column as well. Our applications will also show the oil’s behavior over time. That adds a fourth dimension to our model.

PBN: How are the models that you’re using now different from those used in the past, say around the time of the Exxon Valdez oil spill?

deWARDENER: In general, they’re the same, but one of the big differences is that we have tools now that allow us to grab more immediate data to use as environmental parameters. We also have applications that can better visualize conditions. With our Oilmap application, for example, you can actually see the track of the oil slick, and you can take slices of the water and see how the oil is dispersing through the water column. That kind of stuff you didn’t have during Exxon Valdez. The visualization wasn’t as dramatic as it is now.

PBN: Why can you create better visualizations now?

deWARDENER: The improvements in visualization are directly related to the power of PCs at this time. The computing power at our disposal has allowed developers to create much more stunning applications as far as visualization goes.

PBN: ASA helped develop a search-and-rescue application, SAROPS, for the U.S. Coast Guard. What capabilities did they need?

deWARDENER: The Coast Guard needed to create SAR cases as soon as they were alerted. They needed to gather data and estimate uncertainties. They needed a model to estimate what their search area should be, so they know the best place to place their assets to maximize the chance of them finding an object or person in the water.

With SAROPS, they wanted something that would help them determine their search areas quicker. They wanted to minimize the amount of data a user had to put into the process and automate the inclusion of environmental parameters such as wind and currents. They also wanted to leverage the ability of newer, faster computers to provide them with greater visualization. So our goal in designing SAROPS was to give the Coast Guard the same end product but to give it to them faster, to reach it in an easier manner and to show the users visually what the results were.

PBN: What trends do you see in environmental modeling?

deWARDENER: We’ve seen a lot of interest in our search-and-rescue and oil map products. We expect the need for that kind of modeling to increase. There’s also a growing need for a consistent source of data, so we’re concentrating our efforts not only on our modeling applications, but on our environmental data server, which automatically gets wind and current data from several sources through the Internet. We’re also working on a Web client that allows you to select a last known position and create an “area of interest” for you and forecast a path for the object over time.