AIS Tracking Drift Buoy Test

At sea testing was performed of the new AADI Drift and Personnel Tracking Buoy at the Goliath Oil Field in the Barents Sea to demonstrate the systems performance under design conditions. Mother Nature provided exceptional weather conditions to challenge any systems capability with high winds and heavy seas.

The buoys transmitted GPS position, speed and direction via AIS and Iridium communication systems. Once the signals from the targets were picked up at a distance of 7NM, the contact with the buoys was never lost.

Weather conditions proved to be more demanding than initially planned. Instead of moderate to strong breezes, there was a storm conditions with gusts above 22m/s and wave heights exceeding 9m. As the buoys must work and survive extremely harsh weather and wave conditions when responding to oil spill or man overboard events, they really were 'thrown off the deep end'and had to learn to swim.

The AIS tracking drift buoys followed each other as designed. They drifted a little faster than the Met/Ocean current drift buoy. This was expected, considering the effect surface winds have on the AIS buoy designed with the same drift characteristics as floating oil.