The Need

The ability to forecast catch or seasonal abundance of stocks in different areas requires an understanding on various aspects of physical, biological and chemical processes of the sea. This involves basic knowledge of currents, upwelling areas, eddies, gyres and thermal fronts over space and time. Remote sensing observations can provide a significant part of information needed to assess the potential fishery zones. A wide spatial coverage with repetivity at short intervals provides additional advantage to utilize the satellite technology for the forecast of PFZ information. Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll over the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal retrieved from thermal infrared channels of NOAA-AVHRR and optical bands in IRS-P4 OCM / MODIS Aqua data are used for identifying Potential Fishing Zones along the Indian coastline and island regimes.

The multi-lingual PFZ Advisories are generated by INCOIS, on every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to about 500 fish landing centers / fishing villages covering the entire coast line of India under 12 sectors viz. Gujarat, Maharastra, Karnataka & Goa, Kerala, South Tamilnadu, North Tamilnadu, South Andhra Pradesh, North Andhra Pradesh, Orissa & West Bengal, Lakshadweep Islands, Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands.

Multi-lingual IPFZ advisories are being generated and disseminated during the non-ban and non-monsoon period to the entire fishermen community situated all over the entire coast of India and Islands through various modes of disseminations viz. telephone, fax, e-mail, website, doordarshan, radio, news media, etc. To improve the coverage and penetration, advances in Information and Communication Technology have been adapted. With the state of art of Technology available, INCOIS designed and installed Electronic Display Boards (EDB) at major fishing harbours which have made significant impact in the delivery chain. The old multilingual LED based EDB have gone through various technological changes and now lead towards the New Generation EDB which has been developed by INCOIS in collaboration with the Industry.

The new generation EDB facilitates dissemination of satellite images, animations, short-films, ocean state information, disaster information and disaster warning. It also contains an alert system in addition to the normal text information. The new features of the boards are: 32” LCD display panel, two communication channels via satellite communication as primary channel and GSM/GPRS/CDMA/Dial-up as secondary channel, and a built-in single board computer. It has got online broadcast of voice messages and playback of recorded messages, secured siren system with audibility up to 1 km. The additional features are good power backup, solar panels, web-based dissemination, health report of the board and optional dissemination one-to-many/many-to-one information.

About 50,000 beneficiaries / users are regularly utilizing these services to effectively harvest the marine fishery resources. PFZ advisories generated from satellite retrieved SST and Chlorophyll were found more beneficial to artisanal, motorised and small mechanised sector fishermen engaged in pelagic fishing activities such as ring seining, gill netting etc., thereby reducing the searching time which in turn result in the saving of valuable fuel oil and also human effort. A validation experiment in Kerala reported a reduction in searching time to be 60-70% for oil sardine shoals in ring seining with 30-40% reduction reported for mackerel, anchovy, tuna and carangid shoals in ring seining operations.

From the quantitative results of the fishing operations done by identical vessels simultaneously within and outside PFZ area, it was concluded that the average income received by vessels operated in the PFZ areas were considerably higher ( 2 to 3 times) than vessels operated in non PFZ areas. Fishing expenses were also comparatively less for vessels which operated within PFZ.It was also observed that commercially importance species are more abundant in the PFZ Areas and supports richer fishes compared to the non-PFZ Areas.