The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad has reported that Oceansat Satellite data from ISRO are used to prepare the PFZ advisories on the potential rich fishing areas and provide to the sea faring fishermen in all states.

Potential Fishing Zone (PFZ)

• This is the first advisory service started by INCOIS. The backbone of this service is the real-time data for ocean color and SST provided by the OCEANSAT and NOAA respectively.
• This service was started because there was a need to identify the potential fishing zones to help the fishermen to get better catch while they were at the sea.
• This service was started by the Ministry of Earth Sciences with the help of the Department of Space and several institutions under the Ministry of Agriculture.

How it works?

• This service makes use of parameters such as sea surface temperature and chlorophyll content provided by NOAA-AVHRR and Oceancolor satellites.
• Features such as oceanic fronts, Meandering Patterns, Eddies, Rings, Up Welling areas etc. are identified sites for fish accumulation.
• These features can easily be identified from Sea Surface Temperature and Chlorophyll data.
• The availability of Chlorophyll from OCEANSAT and MOdDIS has further enriched these advisories in the recent years.
• Hence, PFZ advisories have helped the fishing community to locate the fishing zones with accuracy.

Special advisories for fisherman

• Another feature of PFZ service is the generation of species-specific advisory to enable the fishermen folk to distinguish between the exploited and under-exploited species in the potential fishing zones.
• This enables them to have sustainable fishery management by targeting only the under-exploited species in the fishing zones.
• This approach enables them to avoid fishing the over-exploited species over and over again.

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