The RITMARE Ocean Observing System for the Italian Seas

Among its objectives, the Italian RITMARE Flagship Programme has the aim to produce a prototype of the RITMARE Ocean observing system explicitelly designed to provide a powerful infrastructure to the Italian marine science community, to help implement national and Europen environmental regulations and to contribute to the future European Ocean Observing System.

The projects takes advantage of the existing platforms (fixed-point moorings, HF and X-band radars, gliders, satellite products), that constitute the basic components of the system. The structure of the RITMARE Ocean observing system is composed by a permanent component (mooring network, satellite images, HF radars) and relocatable component (gliders, drifters, relocatable infrastructures). The increasing number of available relocatable/expandable platforms allow a much larger flexibility in term of allocation of observations but requires an sampling strategy the can be modified according the scientific and socio-economic priorities. As an example, RITMARE focus is set on an experiment on the South Adriatic Pit convective area and its dynamic interactions with the adjacent Bari Canyon cascading site. (Central Mediterranean Sea).

Additional effort is paid to support innovation for sensors (e.g. ship-borne LIDAR, stereo-optic directional wave detection, X-band radar innovative products), operational employment of gliders (e.g. Wave Glider) and new class of operational models.

The integration can be obtained at different level: the is expected to be achieved at ICT level by defining standard interfaces (NedCDF, SOS) and catalogs in order to facilitate the discovery, viewing and downloading services of data and products. The implementation of a distributed platform-oriented RT repositories adopt a number of THREDDS web servers that act as endpoints for the RITMARE portal. The final aim is to decouple the platforms from the observations, moving from a set of observation to a suite of Essential Ocean Variables by means of interoperable web services.