Fiscal Year	2023
Division	Research & Sponsored Programs
Department	Naval Research Program
Investigator(s)	Balogh, Imre L.
Sponsor	NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary	Anthropogenic aerosols emitted from ships cause perturbations to clouds, which impact their optical and thermal properties. Satellites, such as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series, can detect these property changes also known as ship tracks. Ship tracks are temporary cloud trails created by the emitted aerosols of large ships traversing our oceans. Identifying them can potentially improve naval situational awareness, allowing us to understand risks associated with future marine cloud brightening (MCB) geoengineering efforts, or enable remote monitoring of emission fuel regulations. However, the conditions under which they form are poorly understood. The extent of aerosol effects on clouds remains one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate forcing calculations. Our primary research objective is to better understand this phenomenon. Sandia Laboratories, the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO), the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) propose a collaboration to investigate ship tracks and how they could be used operationally to improve our understanding of the battlespace real-time. Our investigation will first include the analysis of automatic identification systems (AIS) ship positioning and climate datasets to confirm and attribute a given ship track with ship type, emission source, location, and atmospheric background conditions. Then, we'll study current operational processes used to report on ship activities in an area of responsibility (AOR). Finally, we'll research the application of modeling and simulation (M&S) tools to create a federated model capable of creating a realistic synthetic environment to further study this phenomenon and integrate it into the Fleet's current intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) processes. Our research deliverables will include a final paper, presentation, and a demonstration of current M&S assets that could be used to model naval environments to better enable operational integration of ship track detection.
Keywords	maritime domain awareness, ship tracking, automatic identification systems (AIS)
Publications	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal