Uncertainties in numerical simulations of environmental issues, e.g. air quality, depend on the description of atmospheric processes that occur at different time and space scales and are driven by the interaction of the atmosphere with land and sea. In this context, marine coastal areas are particularly challenging environments. The sharp discontinuity in surface properties between the sea and the land, with its irregular border line, often demands large computational domains to allow the flow to reach equilibrium over the new surface and high resolution grids to resolve flows induced by the coastal discontinuity. The improvement of model outputs relies on the amount of available information to deal with analytical and or numerical description of specific physical processes, to assimilate data and, to perform model evaluation studies. Offshore complete meteorological/oceanographical datasets for this purpose are seldom collected in the Mediterranean area, especially in central part. One of the existing measurement platforms is the "ODAS Italia 1" multi-sensor spar buoy of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) moored in the Ligurian Sea at 43°47.36' N 009°09.80' E, about 73 Km off Genoa at a water depth of 1377 m. It is equipped with an acquisition system, installed in the small laboratory built at its top, that collects data from both meteorological and marine sensors. The buoy has a design (e.g. total weigh of about 11 tons, unity buoyancy at sea level and damping disk) such as sensitivity to sea heave is negligible. The "ODAS Italia 1" routinely collects at a high frequency the following meteorological parameters: global solar radiation, infrared solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, and precipitation. Along the buoy body, six marine probes installed at different depth from the surface down to 36 m measure physical and biooptical parameters. Space and energy is still available onboard to host new equipment and the modular acquisition system can be customized. The default operating mode provides a data record every hour, transferred in near real time by a satellite phone link to the shore station where the acquired measurements are quality checked and distributed. The "ODAS Italia 1" observing system is operating with the described equipment since February 2000. It has been involved into the EU-funded projects "Mediterranean ocean Forecasting System: Toward Ecosystem Predictions" and "Marine Environment and Security for the European Area" devoted to build up the European capacity in ocean monitoring and to provide an integrated service of global and regional ocean monitoring and forecasting. It is also part of the ongoing project MyOCEAN, which is the implementation project of the GMES Marine Core Service, aiming at deploying the first concerted and integrated pan-European capacity for ocean monitoring and forecasting. In a recent experimental campaign, the ODAS surface data were used for studying the surface processes controlling the evolution of the vertical structure of the atmospheric boundary layer measured using remote sensing instruments from ships. Among other applications buoy observations have been compared with ECMWF analysis for the year 2000 and with the QuikSCAT remote sensed wind estimates for the years 2000-2007. Furthermore, ODAS observations have been used to investigate particular phenomena such as the heat wave on 2003.
The ODAS Italia 1 multi-sensor spar buoy: a platform to collect meteorological and marine offshore data
E Canepa;S Pensieri;R Bozzano;ME Schiano;P Traverso;AM Sempreviva
2009
Abstract
Uncertainties in numerical simulations of environmental issues, e.g. air quality, depend on the description of atmospheric processes that occur at different time and space scales and are driven by the interaction of the atmosphere with land and sea. In this context, marine coastal areas are particularly challenging environments. The sharp discontinuity in surface properties between the sea and the land, with its irregular border line, often demands large computational domains to allow the flow to reach equilibrium over the new surface and high resolution grids to resolve flows induced by the coastal discontinuity. The improvement of model outputs relies on the amount of available information to deal with analytical and or numerical description of specific physical processes, to assimilate data and, to perform model evaluation studies. Offshore complete meteorological/oceanographical datasets for this purpose are seldom collected in the Mediterranean area, especially in central part. One of the existing measurement platforms is the "ODAS Italia 1" multi-sensor spar buoy of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR) moored in the Ligurian Sea at 43°47.36' N 009°09.80' E, about 73 Km off Genoa at a water depth of 1377 m. It is equipped with an acquisition system, installed in the small laboratory built at its top, that collects data from both meteorological and marine sensors. The buoy has a design (e.g. total weigh of about 11 tons, unity buoyancy at sea level and damping disk) such as sensitivity to sea heave is negligible. The "ODAS Italia 1" routinely collects at a high frequency the following meteorological parameters: global solar radiation, infrared solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, and precipitation. Along the buoy body, six marine probes installed at different depth from the surface down to 36 m measure physical and biooptical parameters. Space and energy is still available onboard to host new equipment and the modular acquisition system can be customized. The default operating mode provides a data record every hour, transferred in near real time by a satellite phone link to the shore station where the acquired measurements are quality checked and distributed. The "ODAS Italia 1" observing system is operating with the described equipment since February 2000. It has been involved into the EU-funded projects "Mediterranean ocean Forecasting System: Toward Ecosystem Predictions" and "Marine Environment and Security for the European Area" devoted to build up the European capacity in ocean monitoring and to provide an integrated service of global and regional ocean monitoring and forecasting. It is also part of the ongoing project MyOCEAN, which is the implementation project of the GMES Marine Core Service, aiming at deploying the first concerted and integrated pan-European capacity for ocean monitoring and forecasting. In a recent experimental campaign, the ODAS surface data were used for studying the surface processes controlling the evolution of the vertical structure of the atmospheric boundary layer measured using remote sensing instruments from ships. Among other applications buoy observations have been compared with ECMWF analysis for the year 2000 and with the QuikSCAT remote sensed wind estimates for the years 2000-2007. Furthermore, ODAS observations have been used to investigate particular phenomena such as the heat wave on 2003.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
