WaveNet
Coastal Wave Monitoring
WaveNet is a strategic initiative funded by the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to provide real-time coastal wave data to a wide variety of stakeholders in order to improve management of flood and coastal erosion risk.
Cefas designed and implemented the WaveNet system including an Internet based real-time dissemination and archive facility providing a variety of data products for:
- Strategic flood and coastal defence management
- Large scale shoreline management planning
- Flood forecasting operations
- Coastal erosion and flood defence Design policies
- Climate change studies
Key System Features
- Satellite communications system with automatic processing and quality assurance of telemetry messages from wave buoys.
- Internet interfaced data archive with full configuration records for each buoy, raw and quality assured data.
- Automatic communications system for specific data providers and users who had specialist requirements for WaveNet to interface to their systems
- Automatic creation of a variety of easy to use graphical and tabular data products, published in near real time to the WaveNet Internet site
- GIS based interface to database to permit easy selection of data of interest
- Flexible web based retrieval system to display and download combinations of data from any time period
- Automatic alarm systems for instruments failures or buoy off position messages
Benefits
The WaveNet system successfully provides:
- A fully integrated system with most processes fully automated
- Easy access to key data products (specified by users) using a standard Web browser
- High performance - Rapid data retrievals from a very large dataset
- High levels of system reliability and availability
- Low running costs
- The capability to readily and economically add new data sources and measurements
- High levels of security from loss of raw and processed data
WaveNet Website: www.cefas.co.uk/wavenet