The St. Lawrence Waterway is a major route for waterborne commerce in North America. Navigation along this waterway can be difficult because of the shallow water sections. Therefore, ensuring a safe and optimal navigable depth along the St. Lawrence Waterway is a major concern for the Canadian Coast Guard.
The Canadian Coast Guard is implementing an e-Navigation system along the St. Lawrence waterway, including dynamic management of a ship’s under-keel clearance. This system provides real-time data to ensure efficient and safe navigation. Bathymetric data and water depth may be among the most important information needed to optimize ship load and avoid groundings.
Owing to Quebec’s cold climate, the St. Lawrence River is covered in ice during winter, making surveys impossible for several months each year. Consequently, real-time bathymetry is impossible to provide. Furthermore, many reaches of the St. Lawrence have a dynamic bed as a result of sedimentation and bed movements/transport. To predict a ship’s “real” under-keel clearance, the water depth needs to include navigable depth, which takes sedimentation and the waterway bed movements into account.
This presentation proposes new statistical approaches for assessing a bathymetric navigational depth used to calculate and monitor the under-keel clearance of merchant vessels transiting through the St. Lawrence Waterway. The navigational depth is assessed from the most recent bathymetry. In particular, panel data analysis methods are very promising for modelling and predicting winter sedimentation. They are now applied to data from the St. Lawrence Waterway. This application characterizes changes in winter sedimentation over the past 15 years in the waterway between Montréal and Trois-Rivières, which can be used for sedimentation rate forecasting.
In addition, this presentation discusses the results of a spatio-temporal analysis of sedimentation based on clustering methods. These results can be used to recommend relevant navigational depth predictive model to use for dynamic, optimal and safe management of the under-keel clearance of merchant vessels in e-Navigation systems.