  A topical collection on "Advances in Search and Rescue at Sea" has appeared
in recent issues of Ocean Dynamics following the latest in a series of
workshops on "Technologies for Search and Rescue and other Emergency Marine
Operations" (2004, 2006, 2008 and 2011), hosted by IFREMER in Brest, France.
  Here we give a brief overview of the history of search and rescue at sea
before we summarize the main results of the papers that have appeared in the
topical collection.
  Keywords: Search and rescue (SAR), Trajectory modelling, Stochastic
Lagrangian ocean models, Lagrangian measurement methods, ocean surface
currents.
