To prepare for the 2022 hurricane season and better protect Colombia’s Caribbean islands, scientists are deploying two Nortek AWAC subsea sensors.
The sensors deliver real-time data on the wave and current direction and strength, which allows scientists to more accurately model the effects of the hurricanes heading their way.
The introduction of the new sensor came in the wake of the 2020 season, where 14 hurricanes devastated several of Colombia’s Caribbean islands. According to Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Executive Director of CEMarin (the Center of Excellence in Marine Sciences), Prof. Andrés Fernando Osorio Arias:
“We use these models to create reconstructions of hurricanes that have occurred in the past, and also to predict scenarios that have not yet occurred – synthetic scenarios of hurricanes…It’s important to collect information from the field and try to reproduce conditions on a laboratory scale because, in the laboratory, you have more control of the different factors. With field and laboratory data, you can develop new equations, new parameters and new physical understanding of physical processes to improve the models.”
While Nortek’s Senior Sales Engineer for Latin America, Cristobal Molina, said:
“The waves on the surface are a combination of many waves, which have different directions, periods, and heights. The AWAC acoustic sensor takes measurements over a long period, allowing us to discriminate between the different waves.”