AUG Signals Radar System detects and monitors large mammals and alerts drivers

IN THE wilds of Canada and Skandanavia, thousands of motorists have serious life-threatening collisions involving moose and large mammals.

Collisions with large mammals weighing in at 1,000 Kg will cause serious damage to vehicles and inevitable human fatalities.

A new roadside radar system could prevent collisions by detecting and keeping track of large animals, whilst at the same time, warning drivers when it would be wise to slow down and be alert to potential collisions.

Abir Mukherjee of AUG Signals in Toronto says existing set-ups, which use light beam tripwires, are not reliable.

"With a tripwire system, when an animal crosses it into the road, it will alert," he says. "But after a fixed time, the system goes off. Then the system doesn't know where the animal is."

The Large Animal Detection System (LADS) sends out a 360-degree radar signal every second, then monitors the reflections to work out what animals are there. Its software allows it to ignore small animals and vegetation in the radar's path.



The detector has been running as a pilot project on Canada's Highway 416 near Kemptville, Ontario, since last year. LADS has an effective radius of 700 metres and works in harsh weather and heavy snow.

When it detects an animal, lights flash on street signs to alert drivers. It also records data on the number and speed of vehicles.

Mukherjee will present a paper on LADS at the IEEE Sensors conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in November.

ESA Envisat monitors Gulf oil spill proximity to Loop Current

As fears grow that the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico could soon catch the oil slick and drag it south towards coral reefs in the Florida Keys, scientists are monitoring the situation closely with ESA’s Envisat radar data.

By combining surface roughness and current flow information with Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data of the spill, SAR image analysts are able to detect the direction in which the spill boundaries can drift.

In these two ASAR images for 29 April and 2 May, advanced processing methods have been performed to display ocean surface roughness variations and Doppler-derived ocean surface radial velocities.

Merging this information provides insight into the spatial structure of the spill and its dispersion by the upper ocean turbulent flow.

Overview of the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico and its extension on the US East Coast called the Gulf Stream. Radial velocities (east-west component of velocity) are estimated from Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) on this one-year composite.

The main path of the Loop Current and the Gulf Stream is highlighted by the red trajectory.

Go to ESA Envisat site for more info