The hundreds of energy- and chemical-related industrial sites located around the Mediterranean Sea represent a formidable challenge for environmental protection. An EU-funded Argomarine project has developed a system to make the task easier.
Around 150 million people are concentrated on the 46 000 km of Mediterranean coastline, with 110 million of them living in cities, while some 200 million tourists arrive in the Mediterranean region every year, according to Italy’s Tuscan Archipelago National Park. Meanwhile, more than 200 petrochemical and energy installations, chemical companies and chlorine plants are located along the Mediterranean coast. These figures represent a major challenge for the preservation of the Mediterranean environment, with over 80% of pollution originating from human activities, including the heavy marine traffic associated with industrial activities.
The EU-funded Argomarine project, aimed at developing a better system for monitoring marine traffic in environmentally sensitive marine areas, is using sophisticated electronic, geopositioning and telematic tools and a high-speed data transmission network. Data from different sources are collected and sent to a main acquisition and elaboration central unit. The sources include:
• satellite, airborne and vessel-mounted sensor platforms to capture
• images of the area of interest, regardless of cloud cover and weather conditions
• underwater monitoring technologies for passive acoustic monitoring to detect unauthorized access to protected zones
• autonomous vehicles for the detection and confirmation of accidents and oil spills
• mathematical modelling to predict sea hydrodynamics and simulate the fate of oil slicks
• integrated communication and high-performance data processing to produce near real-time information about ship traffic and marine pollution events.
According to its coordinator, one of the main achievements of the Argomarine project, thus far, has been the development of the Marine Information System (MIS), conceived as a connected group of subsystems for performing data storage, decision support, data mining and analysis of data warehouses. It also comprises a web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) portal for the accessing new data products and services. He says the Argomarine MIS fits well within the context of the EU-GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) initiative, also known as Copernicus. A particular issue for Copernicus has been interoperability. The Argomarine MIS portal and data nodes provide services through standardized protocols, facilitating integration with other GMES services.