Description of the meteomarine station of Mazara del Vallo (Sicily)

The monitoring system for this area of the Central Mediterranean overlooking the Strait of Sicily was set up by the Institute of Anthropic Impacts and Sustainability in the marine environment (IAS) of the National Research Council (CNR) within the Interreg Italia-Malta project CALYPSO South - Extending Data and Services for Safer Navigation & Marine Protection. This system allows a continuous real-time acquisition of sea level and sea temperature inside the Mazara del Vallo harbour (TP, western Sicily), together with the acquisition of weather parameters in the same site. In addition to the traditional weather parameters, the system with the other station of Torretta Granitola, is able to monitor the passages of the atmospheric pressure fronts. This kind of monitoring is important for studies on climate change on which the rise in sea level may be assessed, but also for the study of the inter-relationships between the fronts of atmospheric pressure and sea level. 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". The monitoring system was created to provide useful information at local level and to serve for the prediction and mitigation of dangerous events on the population, as well as to increase the port security of the area.

The weather and sea level stations installed in Mazara del Vallo provide high-quality, standardised data and it forms part of the CALYPSO South network of meteo-marine stations in Malta and southern Sicily.

The station is co-ordinated by Dr. Salvatore Aronica, Scientific Responsible for the CNR partner (salvatore.aronica@cnr.it). The staff project is composed by: Dr. Giacalone Giovanni, Dr. Ignazio Fontana, Dr. Angelo Bonanno, Dr. Gualtiero Basilone, Dr. Simona Genovese, Dr. Evelyn Scicchigno, Sig. Pietro Calandrino and Dr. Alessio Langiu.



The Slave station communicates with the Master station through a 2.4 GHz wifi connection. The Master station, in addition to acquiring the data of the installed sensors, receives the data of the slave subsystem, synchronising them and creating the records of values. The master subsystem sends data to multiple remote FTP servers every minute. The data are synchronised, using the GMT time, through the GPS present in the Master station.

The underwater sensor is a pressure transducer for water-level measurements in harbours. It is housed in a titanium protective frame whose diameter is 2.1 cm and 23 cm long, that allows it to be used in saltwater and other harsh environments. It is inserted into a hollow tube to protect it from any impact with external materials. The CS456 outputs either a digital SDI-12 or RS-232 signal to indicate observed pressure and temperature. The sensor has a water-level resolution of 0.0035% FS and worst-case resolution in temperature of 0.006 °C.