Satellite SAR ship detections from PMAR in support of Cutlass Express

Abstract

Cutlass Express is a naval exercise on maritime interdiction and counter-piracy, to which a number of East African countries participate. It is organised by the US Navy for the purpose of regional maritime capacity building. JRC has been invited to join, based on its activities in the PMAR (“Piracy, Maritime Awareness and Risks”) project. The at-sea operations in Cutlass Express took place 25-27 Oct 2011, and during those days, JRC had satellite SAR images collected and analysed. The resulting ship detections were fed into MSSIS / SeaVision, a system to enable international sharing of the maritime picture. In this way, PMAR results were made available to African operational maritime authorities in near-real time. The activity has succeeded in its goals to explore and demonstrate regional sharing of maritime surveillance data in the Horn of Africa, to bring PMAR results to African maritime authorities, to explore how satellite SAR can contribute to the maritime awareness, and to collect a part of the data needed for further work in the PMAR project.