Guarnieri, Antonio

This study presents the design and implementation of low-cost drifters, along with different water monitoring applications. The first application presented is related to the tracking of marine litter from the Arno river mouth (central Italy, Tyrrhenian Sea), while the second one concerns the study of the dynamics of a volcanic lake in central Italy (Lago Albano). Both the implementation phase and the field experience benefited from an integrated approach of low-cost equipment, citizen science and numerical modeling.

The EuroGOOS Coastal working group examines the entire coastal value chain from coastal observations to services for coastal users. The main objective of the working group is to review the status quo, identify gaps and future steps needed to secure and improve the sustainability of the European coastal service provision. Within this framework, our white paper defines a EuroGOOS roadmap for sustained “community coastal downstream service” provision, provided by a broad EuroGOOS community with focus on the national and local scale services. After defining the coastal services in this context, we describe the main components of coastal service provision and explore community benefits and requirements through sectoral examples (aquaculture, coastal tourism, renewable energy, port, cross-sectoral) together with the main challenges and barriers to user uptake. Technology integration challenges are outlined with respect to multiparameter observations, multiplatform observations, the land-coast-ocean continuum, and multidisciplinary data integration. Finally, the technological, financial, and institutional sustainability of coastal observing and coastal service provision are discussed. The paper gives special attention to the delineation of upstream and downstream services, public-private partnerships and the important role of Copernicus in better covering the coastal zone. Therefore, our white paper is a policy and practice review providing a comprehensive overview, in-depth discussion and actionable recommendations (according to key short-term or medium-term priorities) on the envisaged elements of a roadmap for sustained coastal service provision. EuroGOOS, as an entity that unites European national operational oceanography centres, research institutes and scientists across various domains within the broader field of operational oceanography, offers to be the engine and intermediary for the knowledge transfer and communication of experiences, best practices and information, not only amongst its members, but also amongst the different (research) infrastructures, institutes and agencies that have interests in coastal oceanography in Europe.

It is well established that rivers are amongst the most important carriers of the plastic pollution found in the oceans. However, the main processes contributing to plastic and debris fate through riparian systems is still poorly known and understood. The Marine Litter Drifter project from the Arno River aims at using modern consumer software and hardware technologies to track the trajectories and evolution at sea of real Anthropogenic Marine Debris (AMD) from rivers, with a specific focus on the Arno River, in Italy. Innovative and low cost “Marine Litter Trackers” (MLT) were designed, assembled and used in this framework as they are reliable, robust, self-powered and they present almost no maintenance costs. Furthermore, they can be built not only by those trained in the field but also by those with no specific expertise, including high school students, simply by following the instructions. Several dispersion experiments were successfully conducted using different types of trackers in different seasons and weather conditions. The maximum distance tracked was 2845 km for a period of 94 days. The activity at sea was integrated by lagrangian numerical models supporting the planning of the deployments and the recovery of the drifters. The models, in turn could benefit from the observed tracking data for calibration and validation and serve as tools to study and interpret the processes driving macro plastic displacement at sea. In this presentation we describe this activity and we discuss the dynamics of marine litter (ML) dispersion in the Tyrrhenian Sea on the basis of these integrated monitoring tools, as well as the potential of open-source approaches including the “citizen-science” perspective for both improving Big Data collection and educating/awareness-raising on AMD issues.

first_pagesettingsOrder Article Reprints Open AccessArticle Marine Litter Tracking System: A Case Study with Open-Source Technology and a Citizen Science-Based Approach by Silvia Merlino 1,*ORCID,Marina Locritani 2ORCID,Antonio Guarnieri 3ORCID,Damiano Delrosso 3,Marco Bianucci 1ORCID andMarco Paterni 4 1 CNR-ISMAR (Istituto di Scienze Marine-Sede di La Spezia), 19032 La Spezia, Italy 2 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Roma 2, 00143 Roma, Italy 3 Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy 4 CNR-IFC (Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica-Pisa), 56124 Pisa, Italy * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Sensors 2023, 23(2), 935; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23020935 Received: 28 November 2022 / Revised: 9 January 2023 / Accepted: 10 January 2023 / Published: 13 January 2023 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Enabling Citizen Science in Communal Smart Environments with IoT Technology) Download Browse Figures Review Reports Versions Notes Abstract It is well established that most of the plastic pollution found in the oceans is transported via rivers. Unfortunately, the main processes contributing to plastic and debris displacement through riparian systems is still poorly understood. The Marine Litter Drifter project from the Arno River aims at using modern consumer software and hardware technologies to track the movements of real anthropogenic marine debris (AMD) from rivers. The innovative “Marine Litter Trackers” (MLT) were utilized as they are reliable, robust, self-powered and they present almost no maintenance costs. Furthermore, they can be built not only by those trained in the field but also by those with no specific expertise, including high school students, simply by following the instructions. Five dispersion experiments were successfully conducted from April 2021 to December 2021, using different types of trackers in different seasons and weather conditions. The maximum distance tracked was 2845 km for a period of 94 days. The activity at sea was integrated by use of Lagrangian numerical models that also assisted in planning the deployments and the recovery of drifters. The observed tracking data in turn were used for calibration and validation, recursively improving their quality. The dynamics of marine litter (ML) dispersion in the Tyrrhenian Sea is also discussed, along with the potential for open-source approaches including the “citizen science” perspective for both improving big data collection and educating/awareness-raising on AMD issues.

Il documento descrive i risultati due progetti di ricerca libera INGV (ML-DAR e ML-CSA) che hanno come obiettivo lo sviluppo di rifiuti marini tracciati a basso costo e lo studio del percorso che questi fanno allo sbocco dei fiumi in mare (il primo) con il coinvolgimento di volontari e studenti (il secondo).

In this work, we analyze the geomagnetic field measurements collected from 2017 to 2020 at the Italian observatories of Lampedusa and Duronia (an island and inland site, respectively) for investigating a possible signature of the tidal sea water level changes on the local magnetic variations. We obtain the following main results: (a) evidence of the geomagnetic power spectral peaks at the solar and lunar tidal main frequencies at both sites is found; (b) by using a robust fit procedure, we find that the geomagnetic field variations at Lampedusa are strongly influenced by the lunar tidal variations in the sea level, while at Duronia, the main effects on the geomagnetic field variations are associated with diurnal solar ionospheric tides; (c) a single-station induction arrows (SSIAs) investigation reveals different behaviors between Lampedusa and Duronia. Specifically, Lampedusa shows that the induction arrows in different frequency ranges point toward different directions with different amplitudes, probably related to the surrounding regions with different water depths, while Duronia shows a persistent coast effect, with the induction arrows pointing toward the Adriatic sea; and (d) a Superposed Epoch Analysis reveals, only for Lampedusa, a close relationship between SSIAs with a frequency of > 2 mHz ( < 1.3 mHz) and the sea level variations driven by the astronomical O1 tide, indicating an amplitude intensification of ∼ 4 × 10 − 3 ( ∼ 5 × 10 − 3 ) and an azimuthal angle increment of ∼ 3° ( ∼ 9° ), in correspondence to a 1 cm sea level increase.

SOURCE utility for reprocessing, calibration, and evaluation is a software designed for web applications that permits to calibrate and validate ocean models within a selected spatial domain using in-situ observations. Nowadays, in-situ observations can be freely accessed online through several marine data portals together with the metadata information about the data provenance and its quality. Metadata information and compliance with modern data standards allow the user to select and filter the data according to the level of quality required for the intended use and application. However, the available data sets might still contain anomalous data, bad data flagged as good, due to several reasons, i.e., the general quality assurance procedures adopted by the data infrastructure, the selected data type, the timeliness of delivery, etc. In order to provide accurate model skill scores, the SOURCE utility performs a secondary quality check, or re-processing, of observations through gross check tests and a recursive statistical quality control. This first and basic SOURCE implementation uses Near Real Time moored temperature and salinity observations distributed by the Copernicus Marine Environment and Monitoring Service (CMEMS) and two model products from Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), the first an analysis and the second a reanalysis, distributed during CMEMS phase I for the Mediterranean Sea. The SOURCE tool is freely available to the scientific community through the ZENODO open access repository, consistent with the open science principles and for that it has been designed to be relocatable, to manage multiple model outputs, and different data types. Moreover, its observation reprocessing module provides the possibility to characterize temperature and salinity variability at each mooring site and continuously monitor the ocean state. Highest quality mooring time series at 90 sites and the corresponding model values have been obtained and used to compute model skill scores. The SOURCE output also includes mooring climatologies, trends, Probability Density Functions and averages at different time scales. Model skill scores and site statistics can be used to visually inspect both model and sensor performance in Near Real Time at the single site or at the basin scale. The SOURCE utility uptake allows the interested user to adapt it to its specific purpose or domain, including for example additional parameters and statistics for early warning applications.

The rapid ongoing climate change, its driving mechanisms and its environmental, economic and societal implications in the mid to long-term time scales are among the most debated issues within the environmental scientific community today. Albeit the increasing effort made in recent years to understand the complex dynamics of climate change both at national and international level, the degree of comprehension of the behavior of the Earth system as a whole is far from being considered satisfactory. The technological and scientific means available today and the integration of different disciplines offer the possibility to study climate in a multifaceted and manifold way, so that a single specific issue may be approached from different perspectives, resulting in a better focus of the entire problem. MACMAP, a Strategic Department Project of INGV started in October 2020, aims to study the climate change in the Polar and Mediterranean regions by extending and integrating existing data with new observations, modelling outputs and qualitative information from the recent past to near future scenarios (Figure 1). The project follows a multidisciplinary approach involving transboundary expertise from different scientific fields: from atmospheric science to oceanography and hydrology, from space to sea level studies, from seismological to geochemical sciences. In particular, several different open issues are addressed: ● the impact of climate change on the ocean circulation; ● how climate change affects the deep ocean processes; ● the evolution of sea level rise from the recent past to the near future (up to 2100); ● the chemical composition of the sea as a proxy of climate change; ● how climate change affects the isotope composition of meteoric water; ● the relation between the ionized atmosphere and climate change; ● the impact of atmospheric forcing on the cryosphere, which is rapidly changing in response to global warming. Such a diversity of topics and science backgrounds implies a dedicated effort to an optimized and efficient data management, following international standards in compliance with FAIR principles to ensure open data access and interoperability. Beside the scientific targets, this project represents an important attempt to reduce the fragmentation of Research by creating strong synergies among different expertise and thematic

The Mediterranean Sea presents, according to the recent literature, the largest warming rate of the whole global ocean. The amplification of climate change effects in this regional basin can be ascribed to its peculiar topography and thermohaline circulation. Some major changes of its water masses characteristics and its circulation have been recorded by observations and reproduced by model reanalysis. An overview of the main Mediterranean Sea variations from 1950 until nowadays will be presented considering the latest Mediterranean Sea climatological product computed from historical in situ temperature and salinity data within the framework of SeaDataCloud project and the existing reanalysis products from INGV and the Copernicus Marine Service. One of the principal indicator of global warming is the Ocean Heat Content. The estimate and evolution of the Mediterranean basin OHC, computed from several and multi-year products indicates an evident spatial variability in different sub-regions and in different depth layers as a consequence of the hydrodynamics.

The proposed study, conducted in the framework of EMODnet - Physics, presents a preliminary high-resolution climatology of temperature and salinity for the Northern Adriatic Sea. The input data are co-located temperature and salinity profiles integrated from SeaDataCloud (Simoncelli et al., 2020a and 2020b) and CORA5.2 (Szekely et al.,2019) historical datasets. The analysis was performed with the DIVAnd software (Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis in n dimensions, Barth et al., 2014) version 2.6.1. Monthly and seasonal fields are calculated for the periods 1955-2016, 1955-1984 and 1985-2016, while seasonal fields are provided for 6 decades from 1955 to 2016. The climatological fi elds are computed on a regular grid of 3 km of horizontal resolution on 11 vertical layers. The preliminary results show a significant impact of horizontal resolution on the detection of small-scale patterns of temperature and salinity fields, but they also outline criticalities due to both spatial and temporal data gaps in particular along the Croatian coast and in the last decade. Further developments will consider the integration of other datasets in order to reduce such gaps and to increase the resolution of the climatological products.