APEM 3D-Maps Hornsea Three Onshore Cable Route

APEM has produced detailed 3D maps of the 55km Hornsea Project Three onshore cable route, showing the heights, terrain and surface features.

The company has made the maps by processing thousands of high resolution aerial images of the onshore cable route, surveyed by APEM’s specialist survey aircraft and state-of-the-art camera systems.

The landfall for DONG Energy’s Hornsea Project Three is located on the north Norfolk coast in the vicinity of Weybourne. From there, the cables will follow a carefully chosen route to join up with the National Grid just south of Norwich.

The entire route was surveyed in two days, followed by six weeks of processing the data captured.

APEM said that turning the high resolution 2D images into 3D digital models allows DONG Energy’s engineers to analyse the route in detail on their computers, enabling them to identify places of interest such as sensitive ecological habitats, access points and topographical constraints like hills and steep inclines. Based on this, the engineers can be sent directly to those sections of the routes that need closer inspection on the ground.

The data will also be used by the company’s Consents and Technical teams for survey planning and cable route design.

David Campbell, principal remote sensing scientist at APEM, said: “There are multiple advantages to aerial surveys over ground based surveys and we’re definitely seeing a move towards them. One of the big advantages is that the data is always available on the computer so it can be worked on by several people at once and can be revisited over and over again.”

APEM pointed out that ground truthing showed its models to be accurate to within 20cm, leading to confidence in the datasets.