The key objective is to increase the management capacity of responding to marine and coastal hazards in the Adriatic basin and tomitigate the damage impact caused by increasingly frequent severe weather conditions along the coastal regions in Italy and Croatia.
A number of technical interventions, such a sliterature review, software developments, ad-hoc simulations and testing on relevant case studies, were carried out during this period, which have brought the project closer to its final goal, namely capitalizing on the 2007-2013 IPA Adriatic CBC programme-funded project ADRIARadnet. The latter developed an integrated system to observe and forecast possible scenarios at high hydro-meteorological risk for civil protection purposes.
AdriaMOREintegrated system is currently developing new components and has started implementing a suitable chain, in order to process weather radar data having different technical features; at the same time, preliminary assessments were conducted on case studies in this respect. A “radar mosaicking scheme”was designedcapable of ingestingboth 3D and 2D data to provide, as an output, the field of rain.
The ChyM Hydrological Model - a model designed to provide a general purpose tool for flood alert mapping and hydrological risk management - was tested on the Pescara river outlet. The alarm indexes were calibrated on the basis of the results produced by two case studies, according to the best methods suggested by the scientific literature. In addition, the high-resolution (1km) meteorological model WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) is set upon the coastal area of the Abruzzo region and was tested for coupling with a wave model - the latter can forecast the main marine fields like significant wave height, length and direction.Several cases were evaluatedwith a focus on heavy precipitation events and wind storms.
Moreover,preliminary simulation was conductedfor the evaluation of statistical trends for total suspended matter and chlorophyll concentration using satellite data. These parameters help understand the response of the coastal ecosystems to human pressures, so asto detect eutrophication caused by river runoffs and to recognizethe distribution of fluvial sediment. In this respect, modeling simulations in coastal areas and open sea were also conductedfor the computation of transport and dispersion properties of environmental sensitive tracers.
These first AdriaMORE achievements will befurther developed by the project partners with the aim to equip the involved territories and people with effective tools to tackle severe weather events and other marine risks triggered by hydro-meteorological events, thus reducing damage and increasing safety.