Rapid environmental assessment of the maritime battlespace
Whitehouse, B.G., Vachon, P.W., Thomas, A.C., Quinn, R.J. and Renaud, W.M., Rapid environmental assessment of the maritime battlespace. Can. Mil. J., 7(1), 66-68, 2006.

The navies of NATO engage in rapid environmental assessment (REA) to improve the performance of sensors, weapons and vessels. The Canadian Forces’ Polar Epsilon project, for example, will use Canada’s Radarsat satellite to expand ship and oil spill detection capabilities in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but Radarsat’s performance is influenced by surface winds, waves and currents. Similarly, Canada’s extensive antisubmarine warfare capabilities are founded upon acoustic technologies, the performance of which is influenced by water column density structure and other environmental parameters, such as the depth and character of the sea floor.

Civilian organizations also assess marine waters on an operational basis. In fact, military and non-military operational requirements are so interrelated that effective REA and its civilian equivalent can be fulfilled through a cooperative network of sensors, platforms, communications systems, data processing, storage and distribution architectures, and environmental models. A lack of coordination between these two components of a nation’s ocean-observing capabilities will, in most cases, prevent that nation from attaining state-of-the-art in REA.