Identification of Initial Areas for Maritime Search and Rescue Operations Through Drifting Buoy Data Assimilation

Serguei Lonin (), Iván Plata, Carlos Romero-Balcucho and Jesús Navarro
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Serguei Lonin: Research Oceanology Group, Faculty of Oceanography, Escuela Naval de Cadetes Almirante Padilla, Sector Manzanillo, Cartagena 130001, Bolívar, Colombia
Iván Plata: Research Oceanology Group, Faculty of Oceanography, Escuela Naval de Cadetes Almirante Padilla, Sector Manzanillo, Cartagena 130001, Bolívar, Colombia
Carlos Romero-Balcucho: Research Oceanology Group, Faculty of Oceanography, Escuela Naval de Cadetes Almirante Padilla, Sector Manzanillo, Cartagena 130001, Bolívar, Colombia
Jesús Navarro: Research Oceanology Group, Faculty of Oceanography, Escuela Naval de Cadetes Almirante Padilla, Sector Manzanillo, Cartagena 130001, Bolívar, Colombia

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-16

Abstract: The Search and Rescue at Sea Manual defines several uncertainties related to the initial position and the time elapsed between an accident and the onset of SAR operations. The present article seeks an approach to address this problem through the assimilation of drifting buoy data and their use in correcting the system parameters via an ill-posed inverse problem. The results demonstrate that, in the search for objects at sea, the uncertainty of their initial position must be explicitly considered. Quantitatively, the proposed methodology reduced the uncertainty of the initial search area by approximately 55–60% compared with the traditional approach that assumes a single deterministic initial point. This outcome underscores the potential of data assimilation techniques to enhance the probabilistic accuracy of maritime search and rescue planning.

Keywords: search and rescue at sea; Markovian processes; Lagrange model; telegraph equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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