Calypso South Meteo marine station of Capo Granitola (Sicily)

Description of the monitoring system for Western Sicily

One of the two monitoring system for the Trapani area of the Mediterranean Channel was installed in the small harbour of Torretta Granitola (TP, western Sicily), inside the CNR headquarters. This is a meteo marine station able to acquire continuously both meteorological parameters and sea level and water temperature. A first version of this monitoring system was born in 2007 with the Project "Creation of a prediction station for Marrobbio events to be installed in the fishing port of Mazara del Vallo" (Project code 1999.IT.16.1.PO.011 / 4.17 b / 8.3.7 / 0082 sub-measure 4.17 b POR Sicily 2000-2006 Axis 4 - Local Development Systems) approved and financed by the Regional Councilorship for Cooperation, Commerce, Crafts and Fishing. This installation has been updated and upgraded thanks to the Interreg Italia-Malta Calypso South – Project (Extending Data and Services for Safer Navigation & Marine Protection).

In addition to the traditional weather parameters, the system with the Mazara station is able to monitor the passages of the atmospheric pressure fronts. In fact, certain atmospheric turbulences can often contribute to the formation of local and/or synoptic-scale meteo-tsunami phenomena, often dangerous for the population and known locally with the name of "Marrobbio". This phenomenon is also often present in the Torretta Granitola zone and therefore, monitoring these parameters can help us prevent risks, especially during docking maneuvers and approaches to the small port of Capo Granitola.

The updating and upgrading activities of this Meteo Marine Station were co-ordinated by Dr. Salvatore Aronica, Scientific Responsible for CNR partner in the Calypso South Project. The staff project is composed by: Dr. Giacalone Giovanni, Dr. Ignazio Fontana, Dr. Angelo Bonanno, Dr. Gualtiero Basilone, Dr. Simona Genovese, Dr. Salvatore Mazzola, Dr. Evelyn Scicchigno, Sig. Pietro Calandrino, Dr. Alessio Langiu, Dr. Antonio Bonanno and Dr. Salvatore Mazzola.

The meteo marine station installed in Torretta Granitola provide high-quality, standardised data and it is a part of the Calypso-South network of Meteo-marine stations.

The Capo Granitola Meteo Marine station was installed mainly in a single location inside the small port of Capo Granitola on an embankment facing the sea (position A in figure 1) at about 10m above sea level with the following coordinates 37°34'.16N 12°39'.33 E. The sea level and temperature sensors, are installed in water at a depth of about 1.5 meters protected by a thick PVC housing (position B in figure 1). The sensors in the water are about 50 m away from the pole where the acquisition control unit is installed.

The control unit is equipped with a multiplexing for data reading with appropriate choice of sampling frequencies and is equipped with the following sensors:

• Air Temperature and Relative Humidity - Humicap;
• Wind Speed and Direction - WindSonic Gill;
• Rain - (Rain-O-Matic Professional) of PRONAMIC;
• Global Radiation, Energy Sensor type ES2 of Delta-T Devices;
• Net Radiation - NR-LITE of Kipp & Zonen;
• Sea Temperature, type PT100;
• Sea level, model ATM.1ST/N 1.8955.1505.14.UK of STS SENSORS

The station is connected to the intranet of the Capo Granitola office via a radio link and via a wired connection. A software in the Labview environment has been developed to acquire data from the weather station with a sampling rate of one second, subsequently, at each minute the average, maximum and minimum data are processed. All the acquired data are saved both on .txt files and inserted on DBMS postgres. Furthermore, all the acquired data are sent to an FTP site at the Department of the University of Malta.

The Figure 4 shows the operating diagram of the CG SMM. Currently it is connected to a base interrogation station, consisting of an Industrial PC where software for querying parameters is running. The two are connected through a radio link, but a direct cable connection is also provided, as soon as it becomes possible.

The upgrade of the station also consisted in the creation of various ad hoc programs in the Labview environment of National Instruments, for querying the control unit, data acquisition, data visualization, storage on DB SERVER at the headquarters of Capo Granitola and the transfer of data to the Ftp server of the University of Malta (figure 5).