Barents Sea Watch Web Portal Launched

The information portal 'BarentsWatch' has been launched by the Norwegian Government to provide an accessible surveillance system of the Barents Sea area

BarentsWatch is much more than a web portal for information from the 27 different governmental and research institutions with responsibility for Norway’s management of coastal and sea areas that contribute to the project, Finnmarken informs the 'Barents Observer'. It is constructed in a way that enables the user to make use of the information in many ways.

At the opening Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said that this was one of the core areas of the government’s policy on the High North:  “The coastal state of Norway is taking responsibility here. To get the Barents Sea “online” was one of the main suggestions from the first governmental commission on the High North in 2006”, the minister said.

The BarentsWatch portal contains information services based on data from six government agencies and editorial content from a number of additional agencies and the number of services will gradually increase. The operations centre for the portal is located in Tromsø.

In parallel with the establishment of this open system, a closed, operational system will be developed to combine information from various sources in order to help deal with special situations.

More on the new BarentsWatch portal (with an English translation) is to be found here.