History

The CALYPSO project is pioneering data services in the foreground through the PORTO interface following the experience gained with the KAPTAN online and smartphone application. PORTO is an integrated online service of meteorological-oceanic information developed to help in particular the Port Authorities, the Port Authorities and operators in maritime services, such as Civil Protection and operators who deal with logistics and shipping near the Maltese Islands and southern Sicily. The objective is to provide services deriving from already existing studies of operational oceanography and meteorology, to users interested in the development of such systems.

PORTO è un’interfaccia web interattiva che fornisce all’utente un accesso diretto per visualizzare, analizzare e confrontare diversi set di dati online, quali sottodomini geografici, transetti, informazioni tecniche e sovrapposizioni dei dati estrapolati, personalizzando l’uso dei dati messi a disposizione. Gli Stakeholder, infatti, hanno beneficiato di un’interfaccia dinamica e sempre efficiente, in grado di fornire avvisi tempestivi su eventi metereologici estremi quali venti di burrasca, anomalie nelle correnti marine, informazioni sulle maree, sulle forti correnti. Tali informazioni negli anni sono diventate indicatori importanti per gli stakeholder che possono sfruttarle per mitigare le condizioni avverse in mare, anche per operazioni di salvataggio.

The project also served to promptly monitor the sea and coasts in the Channel between Sicily and Malta, representing an unprecedented achievement in terms of the value of the data and information also available to the Port Authorities.

Calypso Follow On has placed Sicily and Malta at the forefront of such initiatives in the Mediterranean and has served as a springboard for the future, to integrate the system and have coverage of the entire marine space around the Maltese island and the Sicilian perimeter , including the coastal area. Calypso South has made it possible to strengthen both the infrastructure and the modeling adopted for monitoring the sea in Sicily and Malta. It made it possible to extend the HF CALYPSO network also in the coastal area south of Malta as well as in the coastal area north of Malta and on the coasts of southern Sicily and to install sophisticated meteorological stations, allowing the development of a validated forecasting model high resolution.

The recording of meteorological-marine data in real time, with hourly updates of surface currents in the Sicilian-Maltese Channel, has made it possible to support applications to optimize safety during navigation, to perfect "Search&Rescue" support tools for search and rescue at sea , to have accurate real-time weather and marine forecasts and monitor sea conditions and ultimately to monitor accidental and non-accidental hydrocarbon leaks into the sea.

Thanks to the implementation of the CALYPSO SOUTH Project, the data obtained were "transformed" into advanced services specifically dedicated to some stakeholders. Specifically, an advanced oil spill modeling model has been developed, also thanks to numerous emergency exercises on the response and mitigation to a possible accident at sea, with the main stakeholders involved and with the European Maritime Safety Agency.

Beyond CALYPSO was therefore born as a capitalization project to further strengthen the modeling chains of identification, tracking and mitigation of the impacts deriving from "oil spills" by exploiting the results already obtained with previous projects and extending the calculation domain beyond the area of the flow channel Sicilian-Maltese, up to the coasts of Tunisia.

Numerous dissemination actions of the project results which will include seminars and training sessions also dedicated to stakeholders from the west-MED area of Italy, Malta and Tunisia. In fact, starting from the observation of the trajectories of drifters released near the Maltese archipelago, it was found that a pollutant can very well reach the Sicilian coasts just as it can quickly reach the Tunisian coasts. 

In this project, a number of oil spill models (e.g. MEDSLIK, PyGnome) will be tested on a larger domain, ideally reaching Tunisia. The outputs of the different models will be validated thanks to the release of a considerable number of drifters. The models will be tested and calibrated using CMEMS-COPERNICUS products as forcing. Data from different sources (SAR satellite images) will be used jointly to optimize the detection and tracking capabilities of oil spills.

Already in the short term, Beyond Calypso will be able to play a fundamental role in safeguarding a marine area larger than the current one, also involving states in the WestMED area outside the program. The project also concerns the transfer of knowledge and good practices for the management of spills at sea. In fact, the states of the westMED area could adopt the knowledge and experiences of the CALYPSO projects by developing a wider HF network that allows both greater accuracy of the numerical models and a further extension of the investigated Mediterranean marine areas.

The new partnership is coordinated by the University of Palermo (UNIPA), the University of Malta (UM), the University of Catania (UNICT), the National Research Council (CNR-IAS), the Regional Protection Agency Environmental (ARPA) and the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA).