Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) has awarded Fugro a contract to deliver the offshore wave and current measurement network for Italy’s marine and coastal ecosystems.
The two-year project will be executed with Italian partners Poliservizi Srl and Prisma. Under the scope of rete ondametrica e correntometrica d’altura (ROCA) network, two seabed tsunami early-warning stations in the Sardinian Channel and the South Ionian Sea will also be included.
The contract is part of ISPRA’s Marine Ecosystem Restoration (MER) Project, a National Recovery and Resilience Plan initiative, that aims to restore the marine habitats, fortify the national system for observing marine and coastal ecosystems, and comprehensively map coastal and marine habitats across Italian waters.
While Fugro’s Italian partners will manage most of the marine operations and service work, Fugro will design the buoys’ mooring systems, and install and operate the ROCA network.
This comprises the provision and installation of 11 SEAWATCH Wavescan buoys monitoring network, in water depths of 210 m to 3000 m throughout Italian waters, including the Adriatic, South Ionian, Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas.
Once installed, Fugro’s SEAWATCH Wavescan buoys will continuously measure and transmit real-time Geo-data on metocean parameters such as wave height and direction, current velocity profiles, air temperature and pressure, and wind speed and direction.
The buoys are equipped with a redundant two-way satellite communication system, enabling communication with the new data-receiving center that Fugro will also set up for ISPRA.
”The ROCA network represents an indispensable tool to acquire detailed and reliable data and information on climate change that is affecting, and will affect, our countries in the future. In fact, today’s climate change scenarios are based on global modelling systems that do not consider specific and proper measured data on currents in the Mediterranean Sea.
“In this respect, the ROCA network will provide an optimal spatial coverage of Italian waters and Mediterranean Sea,” said Giordano Giorgi, ISPRA’s National Coordinator of MER Project and Director of ISPRA’s National Centre for Coast.