The missing row in a standard table
Search-and-rescue drift modelling rests on leeway coefficients — how much of the wind an object 'feels' — catalogued per object class in the taxonomy published for the United States Coast Guard. Persons in water, life rafts, swamped hulls, surfboards: measured. A kiteboard, a deflated kite in the water, a bar and lines: absent. The nearest classes differ from each other by large factors, and sensitivity runs show the choice of coefficient dominating the outcome of a kite-equipment drift estimate by more than any other input.
In the program's own evidence vocabulary, kite-equipment leeway is NOT ESTABLISHED — and every estimate that touches it says so visibly.
Why lost gear is the way in
Every board lost and found on a kite coast is a complete drift experiment nobody records: a known release point and time, a known recovery point and time, and archived wind, current and tide conditions in between. The community already trades these stories informally. A registry that gives them a home returns equipment to riders on the surface — and produces, underneath, the first measured drift dataset for kite equipment anywhere.
A confirmed lost-and-found pair becomes a data point with declared quality grades; a season of them becomes a publishable first estimate. Reports are recorded as reported; a corroborated pair is recorded as observed; coefficients derived from small samples will carry their sample size and spread openly.
The controlled version
Alongside the registry, a small controlled experiment is designed: tracked kite equipment released and chased by experienced riders on a home beach, recovered the same session, with the drift prediction frozen and hashed before each release. Ten to twenty scored releases across a season would turn NOT ESTABLISHED into MEASURED — bounded, small-sample, and honest about both.
This is research. Estimates are models, not guarantees; a model is never an observation, and a machine estimate is never “confirmed” — only a human reviewing it in the field makes it verified. Nothing on this page is an operational-capability claim, a safety promise, or a prediction of a specific event at a specific place.
References & data
- 1.Allen & Plourde (1999), U.S. Coast Guard — Review of Leeway — the taxonomy in which kite equipment has no entry.
- 2.Copernicus Marine Service / ERA5 — The environmental archives against which registry cases are reconstructed.
- 3.Mar de Volta — The program's lost-gear registry — community lost-and-found on the surface, drift science underneath.