Why is IMPRESSIVE important?
Dr. Ioannis Dontas – Aratos Technologies
IMPRESSIVE project will advance the state of the art of current methodologies to perform environmental surveillance at harbors and surrounding areas in several aspects. Typically harbors employ for their environmental monitoring activities manned boats and sampling stations at fixed positions. Novel aspects of the tools to be developed in this proposal include a trans-disciplinary approach, which combines several new remotely operated tools that will be integrated in a unique platform.
Moreover, SAR images have been systematically used in recent years for monitoring open ocean waters and waste or oil spills. Usage of SAR and optical Sentinel images for monitoring harbor spills and integrating them in a remotely operated tool is a novel technology (especially in the case of the sentinel 2A and 2B launched in 2017) that it is not currently operative in any harbor and it is proposed by IMPRESSIVE.
Remotely operated drones and Autonomous Surface Vehicles equipped with specific devices to report a waste or an oil spill on the ground is an emergent technology that it is recently used in multiple marine environments. Their application in harbor conditions is a challenge, which if successfully developed will supply a promising approach for harbor monitoring. The ASVs low-cost prototypes which are proposed by IMPRESSIVE (sailing boat and catamaran-like) could provide a patent with a wide international future potential market perspectives (Harbors) complementary to those proposed during the last decade.
Downscaled hydrodynamic models from Copernicus operational systems have been developed just very recently. The development of these downscaled models for harbor management applications is actually an unexplored field, which opens exciting possibilities, pushing forward European harbors management at the forefront of a worldwide leadership. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no European harbor with this tool implemented in an operational mode and thus such a tool is proposed by IMPRESSIVE.
