Surveys are expensive. Screening tells you where to run them.
A geophysical campaign costs hundreds of thousands of euros and weeks of vessel time. This atlas does not replace it: it targets it. You know where the seabed is mobile, where scour threatens, and which corridor minimizes risk before chartering anything.
From bed shear stress to the route
Nothing empirical: the chain starts at bottom-boundary-layer physics and works up to the corridor, each step traceable and reproducible.
What the pipeline has already produced
Two proof tiles, North Sea and Dover Strait. The figures below come from the golden tests, not from orders of magnitude.
From the area to an arbitrated route
Choose the depth of analysis that matches your project phase. Firm quote after scoping.
Stated honestly
Screening is not a survey. Here is precisely what this atlas does not do.
Who this is for
Any routing decision taken before, or instead of, an exhaustive survey.
| Audience | Trigger | Contact |
|---|---|---|
Submarine cable layers and installersPrimary | Route and burial-depth arbitration ahead of survey | Engineering office, route engineering lead |
Offshore wind developers | Inter-array cables and shore connection | Study lead, owner's engineer |
Telecommunications operators | New intercontinental link, sensitive landing points | Network engineering, project management |
Engineering and survey companies | Upstream scoping to size a campaign | Geophysical project manager |
What clients ask us
Can a mobility atlas replace a geophysical survey campaign?
No. The atlas works from public data at 500 m resolution: it detects neither isolated obstacles nor local geotechnical anomalies. Its role is to target the survey, by showing where the seabed is mobile and which corridor minimizes risk, before you commit a vessel.
How do you determine whether the seabed is mobile?
Through physics, not from a map. We compute the combined wave-current shear stress following Soulsby (1997), then compare it to the critical Shields threshold (Soulsby & Whitehouse) calibrated on the site grain size. Above the threshold, sediment starts moving.
Where does your data come from?
From public, referenced sources: IFREMER RESOURCECODE for waves, Copernicus Marine (CMEMS) for hourly tidal currents, EMODnet for bathymetry and Folk geology, and SHOM for 1:50,000 seabed types. No proprietary licensed data.
How is the optimal corridor traced?
The mobility, scour and constraint layers are merged into a cost-risk field. An A* algorithm searches it for the least-cost path between the two landing points. We also deliver the Pareto alternatives: on one of our tiles, the shortest route saves 0.8 km but costs 0.6 additional risk points.
How reliable are the results?
Reliability is measured and shipped with the atlas. Validation against 51 SHOM points (velocity ratio 0.98 to 1.03), against 908 observed dune crests (p ≈ 8e-9), and classification robustness at 100% in the North Sea when grain size is shifted by one Folk class. Return levels carry their 95% confidence interval.
Does the pipeline work outside the Channel and the North Sea?
Yes, it is zone-agnostic. The two proof tiles are in the North Sea and the Dover Strait, but the chain only depends on the availability of wave, current and geology data. A new area costs one run and one configuration.