Design and Development Shallow water Surface Drifter to study Rip current behavior at coastal Andhra Pradesh in real time

Rip currents are narrow, seaward traveling currents that approach seaward all the way through the surf zone, often in a deeper rip channel. They are a major hazard to beach rescues and drowning activities takes place at beaches. These rip currents are unsafe to the bather and they don't have awareness on rip currents. Sometimes it can achieve maximum speed and ability to pull a person into the sea which leads to drowning. Most of the drowning situations noted in coastal regions of Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India. The coastline is formed with headland and bay which triggers the occurrence of rip currents zones in the beaches leading to the drowning cases in the Visakhapatnam coast. This creates hazards for common people who swim in the rip current zones. In this proposed study, an attempt is being made to design and develop a shallow water surface drifter which provides the rip current behavior such as velocity and direction from the swash zone to surf zone by utilizing the GSM-GPRS based GPS tracker installed in Shallow water Surface Drifter (SSD). The Shallow water Surface Drifter as shown in Fig. 1 thrown in the rip current zone from the swash zone and allows the SSD to drift along with the rip current. SSD records the path in real time which helps to find the velocity of rip current. The collected data is very much useful to learn and understand the rip current behavior at the surf zone.