The ISMAR High Frequency Coastal Radar Network: monitoring surface currents for management of marine resources

The Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) established a High Frequency (HF) Coastal Radar Network for the measurement of the velocity of surface currents in coastal seas. The network consists of four HF radar systems located on the coast of the Gargano Promontory (Southern Adriatic, Italy). The network has been operational since May 2013 and covers an area of approximately 1700 square kilometers in the Gulf of Manfredonia. Quality Assessment (QA) procedures are applied for the systems deployment and maintenance and Quality Control (QC) procedures are performed on the data generation pipeline. The network provides hourly sea surface velocity data in real-time mode, that are published for visualization and access. In order to produce data in interoperable formats, according to the standards of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for the access and delivery of geospatial data, a netCDF architecture has been defined on the basis of the Radiowave Operators Working Group (US ROWG) recommendations and compliant to the Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions CF-1.6. The hourly netCDF files are automatically attached to a Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) catalog supporting OGC compliant distributions and protocols for data visualization, metadata interrogation and data download. HF radar data have been validated by comparison with velocities measured by drifters deployed within the radar coverage. The data produced by the ISMAR HF radar network are presently used in a number of applications, ranging from oil spill and SAR to fishery and coastal management applications.