Search

Feasibility of derivation of sea surface currents from SAR images has been already shown in several experiments. To our knowledge no examples are provided with reference to sites such as Mediterranean coastal areas where the sea surface currents are characterized by lower intensities. In this work we investigate the possibility to exploit SAR data in the coastal area around Naples where archives of regularly acquired data are available.

This paper is aimed to outline the possible uses of SAR derived wind fields in coastal meteorology, taking advantage of two running projects: the first of meteorological flavor, aimed to measure and reproduce the surface wind field in a small coastal area; the second to investigate the possibilities offered by the combined use of simultaneous COSMO-SkyMed and RADARSAT-2 SAR images in the description of the wind field in the same area. The main issues faced in this study and partially solved are: the development of a suitable methodology to extract the wind field from SAR images at different bands, polarization, incidence angle; the understanding of the potentialities of the SAR derived winds to catch the patterns of the spatial variability of the wind over the coastal area; the assessment of the SAR derived wind from comparisons with the simultaneous experimental data. Of course, the results presented here are not exhaustive, but only aim to track the ongoing research on the topic of wind over local coastal areas.

Sea Situational Awareness (SSA) is strategically important for management purposes of Italian Seas and coastal areas. The lack of adequate dissemination of marine environmental data and consequent poor knowledge available for operations at sea reduce the response capacity, leading to loss of lives and potential socio-economic damages. The SSA topic is being addressed by "TESSA", an industrial research project funded under the PON "Ricerca & Competitivita 2007–2013" program of Ministero Italiano dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita' e della Ricerca. TESSA is a joint effort of research groups of operational oceanography and scientific computing, and aims to strengthen and consolidate the operational oceanography service and to integrate it with advanced technological platforms in order to disseminate information for the SSA. The first product of TESSA is “SeaConditions”, a public service providing ocean and weather forecasts for the Mediterranean Sea, on the web and mobile applications. Every day, forecasts are produced by operational services, such as the Mediterranean Monitoring and Forecasting Center (www.myocean.eu) for the ocean variables and ECMWF for the atmospheric variables. The service delivers detailed information with high spatial and temporal resolution. Main variables displayed on Google Maps are: bathymetry, weather and oceanographic forecasts and satellite ocean colour data. Ocean forecasts are given at different resolution since nested limited area models for Mediterranean sub-regions are also displayed. SeaConditions provides a user friendly interface with zoom and drag Google Maps' features allowing to display data with different levels of details. SeaConditions' main strength is to provide a single point of access to meteo-marine forecasts, which are based on advanced oceanographic models, remote sensing products and bathymetry, and to deliver high quality information. The SeaConditions products are available through web and mobile channels. The web portal www.sea-conditions.com is compatible with all modern web-browsers on all operating systems. For the mobile users, APPs were also developed to consider the different kind of screens and gesture/interactions. The APPs are available on AppleStore and Google Play.