Data Integration System for Marine Pollution and Water Quality

The overall objective of DISMAR has been to develop an advanced information system for monitoring and forecasting the marine environment to improve management of pollution crises in coastal and ocean regions of Europe. The DISMAR services are made in support of public administrations and emergency services responsible for prevention, mitigation and recovery of crises such as oil spill pollution and harmful algae blooms (HABs). In the first two years of the project, we developed the first version of a prototype information system, DISPRO-1. The design and implementation of this prototype was based on user requirements extracted from a survey of existing monitoring services in the participating countries (Norway, Germany, Italy, France, UK and Ireland), complemented with a literature review of recent coastal zone GIS for environmental monitoring, forecasting and risk management. The implementation was based on state-of-the-art GIS and web technologies, in line with recommendations from INSPIRE and GMES. In the third and final year of the project, an extended version – DISPRO-2 – was implemented, tested and validated. A number of algorithms and models for generation of products for marine pollution monitoring and forecasting were used or developed during the project. These products, algorithms and models include: - Ground based radar Doppler (for pollution detection and guiding skimming ships), - ENVISAT ASAR (for oil pollution detection, using both single and multi-channel data), - Aircraft data (IR/UV, laser fluorosensor, microwave sensors, fused for oil spill detection), - New Ferrybox sensor (for in-situ water quality survey and satellite validation). - ENVISAT MERIS/AATSR (for water quality and algae blooms survey), - AVHRR for monitoring of sea-surface temperature, - SeaWiFS, Aqua-MODIS and Terra-MODIS (for water quality and algae blooms survey), - A 3D oil spill drift model (OD3D) that can be set up for multiple ocean areas, - An oil spill drift model tailored for the Adriatic Sea, - An ecological model (for prognostic information on algal blooms, set up for the western English Channel).NERSC Technical Report no. 266. Funded by the European Union, Contract IST-2001-3765