Course stability and yaw motion of a ship in steady wind

In order to achieve safe navigation, it is important to be able to understand and calculate the effects of an external force on the maneuvering behavior of a ship. This paper analyzes the course stability and yaw motion of a ship traveling under steady wind conditions. A course stability criterion and approximate formulae for the yaw motion in steady wind, including the aero/hydrodynamic force derivatives for the ship, are derived. To confirm the reliability of the criterion and formulae, they were used to investigate a pure car carrier in steady wind. The results of this investigation revealed that course instability appears in the head and following wind directions, mainly under the influence of aerodynamic derivatives with respect to the yaw restoring forces. However, this course instability can be reduced by applying steering control. For winds ranging from head winds to beam winds, yaw oscillation appears when the period is relatively long and the damping is small. The analytical formulae derived here can be used to gain a better understanding of ship maneuvering behavior in steady wind.     

High-resolution synthetic monitoring by a 4-dimensional variational data assimilation system in the northwestern North Pacific

A data assimilation system is applied to the integrated monitoring of oceanic states in the northwestern North Pacific by combining a high resolution ocean general circulation model with an adjoint method. A comparison of assimilation results with observations shows that the system is better able to represent synoptic features of ocean circulation than do models or data alone. Furthermore, meso-scale features associated with frontal structures and eddies, which are often seen in the Kuroshio and Oyashio extension regions and the Sea of Japan, are better defined in the assimilation results. These features suggest that our 4D-VAR high-resolution data assimilation system is capable of providing time series data which satisfy the model physics and fit the observations, and hence the ocean state derived from our system has greater information content than that obtained from earlier methods.