From Terabytes to Insights: Why a Great GUI is Key for Subsea Cable Health Monitoring
Author: Tom Bache PhD, Data Scientist
The environments in which undersea power cables operate are highly dynamic. To protect these critical assets from the harsh realities of the seabed, the offshore renewables industry is increasingly turning to Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS).
DAS transforms standard optical fibres within a subsea power cable into a continuous array of thousands of highly sensitive, real-time vibration sensors. For example, a 100 km cable effectively becomes 10,000 highly sensitive virtual sensors, each 10m long, polling at least 1,000 times per second. This allows stakeholders to identify the locations of risks and faults along the cable without the need for equipment in the water.
However, this incredible sensitivity and rich coverage creates a new hurdle for Operations and Maintenance (O&M) teams: a monumental data deluge.
Capturing data is only the first step. The true value of a problem-solving monitoring system lies in how that data is captured, translated, compressed, and intuitively displayed for the user.
In this post, we explore why a great Graphical User Interface (GUI), built on a foundation of proprietary data processing, is essential for turning raw acoustics into actionable intelligence for subsea cables, offshore wind turbine structural health monitoring (SHM), metocean attributes and vessel detection.
Ultimately, the right GUI is what shifts your operations from reactive, costly repair to proactive, predictive, budgeted maintenance. By making complex data instantly understandable, it buys your O&M team months and years of beneficial time to schedule interventions, averting costly failures.
The Data Deluge: Terabytes of Raw Noise
A typical DAS system deployed on an export cable or wind farm array generates an astonishing amount of data. By returning a rich stream of strain measurements several thousand times per second at typically thousands of sequential locations along a cable, a single DAS interrogator can produce terabytes of raw data every single day.
operators.
Traditionally, analysing this data required experts to manually interpret complex, high-resolution waterfall plots and spectrograms. While these visualisations are excellent for deep forensic analysis of acoustic signatures, such as identifying vessel noise or anomalous frequencies, they are entirely unfeasible for daily asset management.
O&M teams cannot be expected to sift through terabytes of raw acoustic charts to determine if their cables are safe.
If operators are left in the dark about what the data actually means, the monitoring system has failed.
The true value of a monitoring system, therefore, lies in how that data is translated, compressed, and ultimately displayed to the user. A great GUI, built on a foundation of proprietary data processing, is essential for turning raw acoustics into actionable cable health intelligence.
Ultimately, the right GUI is what shifts operations from reactive repair to proactive, predictive maintenance. By making complex data instantly understandable, it buys O&M teams precious time to schedule interventions and avert costly failures before they happen.
Indeximation® and the Power of Algorithms
Using the example of continuous subsea power cable monitoring, we rely on our proprietary data compression engine, Indeximation®. This technology compresses the immense volume of raw DAS data, allowing us to continuously transfer it to our cloud-based Scattersphere® platform using low-bandwidth connections, such as a simple 1 Mbps 4G signal, that are often what is available at offshore substations.
Once in the cloud, our advanced algorithms take over. Instead of simply presenting raw acoustics, our system runs proactive algorithms to spot and articulate patterns, trends and risks in motion.
We automatically assess the data against seven critical risk indicators:
- Strain
- Armour Integrity
- Fatigue
- Cable Skipping
- Exposure
- Abrasion
- Tidal Vibration
The resulting outputs are then fed directly into the Scattersphere® GUI, transforming complex physics into a simple, live, client-empowering risk view.
The same methods apply in the case of metocean characterisation, offshore wind turbine SHM and maritime domain awareness (MDA).
GUI Best Practices Deployed in Scattersphere®
A great GUI must bridge the gap between complex engineering data and quick, strategic decision-making. When designing Scattersphere®, we deployed several industry-leading UI/UX best practices to ensure our customers get a practical, continuous picture of cable health.
Note: all screenshots of Scattersphere® below are based on real data but overlaid onto mock-up wind farm assets to preserve confidentiality.
1. Geospatial Context and Map-Based Navigation
Rather than staring at spreadsheets or isolated data points, users need to see exactly where their assets lie on the seabed.
Scattersphere® employs a clean, GIS-mapped interface that displays the exact routing of interconnect, export and inter-array cables alongside wind turbine locations. This provides immediate spatial context, allowing operators to visually pinpoint where a risk is occurring.
2. Clear Visual Hierarchy and Status Dashboarding
In a routine daily check, O&M managers need to know the bottom line immediately.
Scattersphere® utilises an intuitive traffic-light colour coding system and a top-level dashboard. At a glance, users see a summary of cable health, for instance quickly identifying that there are exactly 12 Critical zones, 12 Moderate zones and 38 A.O.I. zones, meaning Areas of Interest.
This visual hierarchy ensures that the most urgent risks draw the eye first, preventing alarm fatigue.
3. Progressive Disclosure for Actionable Insights
A core principle of a great GUI is progressive disclosure: showing the user only the information they need right now, while making deeper insights easily accessible.
In Scattersphere®, risk locations are clearly identified on the map and, with a single click, operators can reveal the specific causes of that risk.
An example is shown below, where selecting an individual turbine node brings up a detailed pop-up, breaking down the specific cable zones. In this case, several indicators that point to excessive cable movement, such as tidal vibration and strain, are found at the Touchdown Point to Aperture location.
This Moderate risk location would be flagged for further monitoring at this time, but any further degradation could indicate that stabilisation is required.
4. Historical Trending for Predictive Maintenance
Cable failure is rarely instantaneous. It is usually the result of cumulative fatigue or ongoing abrasion.
The Scattersphere® GUI allows users to seamlessly transition from looking at a current risk to exploring its history. Operators can drill down to intuitive line graphs showing the Distance Profile, where risk levels are mapped across the length of the cable, and the History at KPoint, which tracks how a certain risk at a specific location has fluctuated over weeks and months.
These forensics empower users to distinguish between normal seasonal cycles and dangerous, permanent shifts in structural integrity.
From Reaction to Prediction
By stripping away the noise of raw terabytes and replacing it with a refined, user-centric interface, Scattersphere® shifts cable management from reactive repair to proactive, predictive maintenance.
Technology should not be lost in translation. Our interface strips away the noise, providing your team with the one thing they need most: time.
With a simplified digital history of your cable’s health, you can intervene before a minor issue becomes a catastrophic failure. Protect your offshore investment, streamline your operations and take the next definitive step toward reducing your LCOE with confidence.
Are You Ready to Stop Reacting and Start Predicting?
If you want to learn more about how Scattersphere® can shine a light on your subsea power cable health, reach out to us at enquiries@indeximate.com or explore our Knowledge Hub.
