With the winter deployment for the BLUEcoast project over and done with, Marlan are working on some serious permanent deployments for the coming winter in partnership with Wyre Council. Before these permanent survey and monitoring systems go in, the Synoptic Rapidar was deployed in its off-grid configuration to Cleveleys on the Fylde peninsula to see if we could observe some evidence of beach recovery over the summer and attempt to detect the subtle beach rotation anecdotally suspected to be occurring.

Rapidar being lifted into position ready to be deployed

The Synoptic system was only deployed 7 m above mean high water springs, and so encountered some shadowing issues caused by the many large Groynes at Cleveleys. Despite these limitations, the radar is still able to image a significant area of the beach and should allow the objectives of this temporary deployment to be met.

Rapidar in off-grid configuration collecting data at Cleveleys beach.

The radar image below shows a cropped view of the area imaged by the system at Cleveleys.

Radar time exposure image of Cleveleys at low tide – pipeline laying equipment visible.

Stay tuned to see some of the initial data products over the next few weeks.