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International Ocean Vector Winds Science Team Meeting (2016 IOVWST), 17-19 May 2016, Sapporo

The overall objective of DISMAR has been to develop an advanced information system for monitoring and forecasting the marine environment to improve management of pollution crises in coastal and ocean regions of Europe. The DISMAR services are made in support of public administrations and emergency services responsible for prevention, mitigation and recovery of crises such as oil spill pollution and harmful algae blooms (HABs). In the first two years of the project, we developed the first version of a prototype information system, DISPRO-1. The design and implementation of this prototype was based on user requirements extracted from a survey of existing monitoring services in the participating countries (Norway, Germany, Italy, France, UK and Ireland), complemented with a literature review of recent coastal zone GIS for environmental monitoring, forecasting and risk management. The implementation was based on state-of-the-art GIS and web technologies, in line with recommendations from INSPIRE and GMES. In the third and final year of the project, an extended version – DISPRO-2 – was implemented, tested and validated. A number of algorithms and models for generation of products for marine pollution monitoring and forecasting were used or developed during the project. These products, algorithms and models include: - Ground based radar Doppler (for pollution detection and guiding skimming ships), - ENVISAT ASAR (for oil pollution detection, using both single and multi-channel data), - Aircraft data (IR/UV, laser fluorosensor, microwave sensors, fused for oil spill detection), - New Ferrybox sensor (for in-situ water quality survey and satellite validation). - ENVISAT MERIS/AATSR (for water quality and algae blooms survey), - AVHRR for monitoring of sea-surface temperature, - SeaWiFS, Aqua-MODIS and Terra-MODIS (for water quality and algae blooms survey), - A 3D oil spill drift model (OD3D) that can be set up for multiple ocean areas, - An oil spill drift model tailored for the Adriatic Sea, - An ecological model (for prognostic information on algal blooms, set up for the western English Channel)., NERSC Technical Report no. 266. Funded by the European Union, Contract IST-2001-37657

We present a discussion about the performances of two different methods to derive the wind field from SAR images. These are the method based on the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT2) (Zecchetto & De Biasio 2002, 2007) and on the estimation of the Local Gradient (LG) (Koch 2004). The CWT2 method extracts the backscatter signatures in the SAR image likely related to the structure of the marine atmospheric boundary layer; it derives the aliased wind direction from direction of the major axis of the cells-like detected structures and then resolves the ambiguity looking at the backscatter distribution inside them. The LG method divides the image into sub images, depending on the space grid over which the wind is requested; then it defines four image operators which are applied on the images to produce a map of valid points on which the local gradient directions are computed. The local wind direction is orthogonal to the more frequent gradient direction. The wind intensity is computed applying the CMOD4 or CMOD5 models for C-band scatterometer. The results of the two methods are compared with satellite scatterometer winds. They are relevant to ERS images taken over the Mediterranean Sea.

In this paper we present the Pilot Project PRIMI, designed to provide information on marine oil spills, and its validation campaign, held in august 2009, conducted with the oceanography ship Urania. During the experiment CosmoSkymed has provided an extraordinary contribution supplying almost any day images over the area inspected by the ship and in some cases also images requested with short notice. © 2010 IEEE.