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Waikato University masters student Shari Gallop hopes to curb New Zealand's horrifying drowning toll by creating a system that predicts rips in the ocean.
Drowning is the country's third-biggest cause of accidental deaths.
Awareness about dangers of rip currents have been highlighted by the death of Warrior's rugby league player Sonny Fai at a West Auckland beach last month.
To help understand rips better, Ms Gallop said she created a computer program to automatically locate rip currents in wave patterns off the Coromandel coast.
She worked with more than three years' worth of images relayed back every second from a camera overlooking Tairua beach.
Ms Gallop said she had focused on changes in rip behaviour, and compared them to wave conditions.
"Using the computer program I've written, you can locate where rips are and track them through time."
The aim was to predict rip currents, where they might form, how many and how strong they might be.
"Ultimately we hope to create a workable tool which will help beach goers and surf lifesavers."
Academic supervisor Karin Bryan of the university's Earth and Ocean Sciences Department said Ms Gallop's research had solved one of the great difficulties in the field - how to get proper data on such elusive things as waves.
- NZPA
