Marine monitoring of vessel traffic on Estonian coast

Integrated coastal radar, AIS and radio communication (VHF) surveillance systems for air and marine vessel traffic monitoring have been set up by Estonian national authorities. As a result, obtaining online recognized maritime picture complemented with reports from vessels containing data on vessel origin and destination, dangerous cargo information, etc has become a reality. Data from different sources is synchronously saved to a database while the content of the database itself is archived periodically to guarantee integrity. The database is connected to similar databases of the Finnish and Russian authorities, and forwards AIS data to the HELCOM database. The established secure digital voice and data communication backbone and database infrastructure will be widely and cost-effectively used for different marine online monitoring tasks, offering a potential for a wide range of integration with vessel traffic data and various other subsystems. The general architecture of the system implemented in Estonia, and the solutions for utilization of the system for marine monitoring tasks will be presented. Some advantages for the Baltic Sea Observation tasks will be suggested.