Eleven European research institutions and industries gathered in Heraklion, Greece, to celebrate the launch of the project to enhance and optimize the flow of data acquired by the underwater observatories of the EMSO infrastructure. This project will make it easier to analyze the effects of climate change and pollution on the deep marine environment and offer better tools for tackling natural hazards.
The project, called "Development of the European Multidisciplinary Observatory of the Seabed and the Water Column" (EMSODEV), takes its first steps and effectively launches the operations of EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Observatory of the Seabed and the Water Column 'waterfall -http://www.emso-eu.org), a continental-scale European research infrastructure in the field of environmental sciences.
Ten countries (Italy, which coordinates it, Spain, France, Romania, Greece, United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Holland) participate in the European EMSO ERIC consortium which manages the EMSO infrastructure with the aim of actively promoting European scientific research on the deep marine environment, under the aegis of the European Commission and with the financial support of the research ministries of the participating Member States, including the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), commissioned by the MIUR, represents Italy in the consortium and coordinates the participation of the Italian research institutions involved and the management of the Italian observatories.
EMSO has to its credit 11 marine observatories and 4 shallow water test sites dedicated to the long-term monitoring of environmental processes affecting the geosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere and their interactions in the deep sea with data transfer ashore also in real time. The observatories, located in European waters from the Arctic to the Atlantic to the Mediterranean up to the Black Sea, form a continental-scale infrastructure at the service of the international scientific community.
“EMSODEV was created to give a great boost to EMSO's operations”,
said Paolo Favali, research manager of INGV and coordinator of both EMSO and the EMSODEV project, during the kick-off meeting of the project, “but the project also has a significant industrial development potential of products and services related to monitoring in Marine environment."
EMSODEV represents a significant phase in the EMSO construction process and has as main objective the development and installation in EMSO observatories of a new multidisciplinary monitoring module called EGIM (EMSO Generic Instrument Module).
The EGIM will consist of a series of sensors and devices which will make most of the data acquired by the various observers homogeneous, facilitating their comparison. The data will thus be managed and made usable in a unified manner in order to create services and products that can be used by a vast number of users. Not only that, when fully operational, EGIM will be a product that can also be used by other research centers and will be attractive for some industrial sectors. The EMSODEV project, which will last three years, is funded by the European Commission (€ 4,3 million) under the European Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020. Research entities from Italy (INGV, coordinator) France (Ifremer), Greece (Hellenic Center for Marine Research), Spain (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas), United Kingdom (National Oceanographic Center Southampton), Ireland (Marine Institute), Germany (University of Bremen - MARUM), Portugal (Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmospfera) and Romania (GeoEcomar), and two private companies based in Ireland (SLR Consulting) and Italy (ENGINEERING- Ingegneria Informatica SpA).
Links to images: http://bit.ly/1P3liqu
Example of a multidisciplinary submarine observatory in use in the EMSO infrastructure: a GEOSTAR class observatory managed by INGV and photographed during the immersion and deposition phase at the bottom of the sea. In the upper part of the observatory the device for deposition and recovery is visible, in the lower part the frame that contains the measuring instruments, the control electronics and the communication system
INGV: with the EMSODEV project a new great step forward for European marine research
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