Special Session 12

SPECIAL SESSION #12

Andrea Buono

Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Italy

• andrea.buono@uniparthenope.it

Silvia Merlino

Istituto di Scienze Marine, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy

• silvia.merlino@sp.ismar.cnr.it

Giulia Buttazzoni

Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Architettura, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy

• gbuttazzoni@units.it

Giuseppe Grieco

Istituto di Scienze Marine, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy

• giuseppe.grieco@cnr.it

Coastal environments are valuable ecosystems where key interaction between air, sea and land occurs giving rise to complex dynamic processes. Anthropogenic coastal activities and met-ocean local conditions contribute altogether to affect coastal dynamics at both small/short and large/long spatio-temporal scales. All this matter locally threaten human settlements, marine ecosystems, socio-economic activities (i. e., fishery, navigation, off-shore wind farms oil and gas exploration, tourism), which are affected - at a growing rate - by human-induced and natural hazards as pollution, erosion and storm surges.

These very complex environments result in a corresponding challenging monitoring that need an integrated observational approach where multi-platform, i. e., glider, drone, ship, aircraft, satellite, sensors and well-designed data exploitation must be considered with the aim of identifying key driving factors, supporting smart resource management and early remediation activities and developing long-term planning.

Accordingly, this special session welcomes the original contributions from scientists belonging to the metrology for the sea community involved in the following research topics: understanding of natural and human-induced coastal processes, wind mapping, shoreline erosion, navigation, pollution, detection of natural and man-made targets, retrieval of sea surface parameters. The above-mentioned list is not comprehensive and original contributions to related topics are also welcome to promote a multi-disciplinary and synergistic perspective on the monitoring of coastal environments.

Keywords relevant to this special session include but are not limited to: sensor calibration, measurement set-up, data fusion, constellations and smart networks, scattering and emission models, artificial intelligence processing, multi-temporal analysis, analysis in spatial, polarization and frequency domain, in-situ campaign.

Andrea Buono, was born in Naples, Italy, in 1984. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information engineering from the Università di Napoli “Parthenope”, Naples, Italy, in 2010, 2013 and 2017, respectively. Since 2018, he has been Assistant Professor with the Università di Napoli “Parthenope.” He is an IEEE Senior Member and Associate Editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. His main research interests are related to applied electromagnetic, including microwave scattering models, radar polarimetry, multi-polarization synthetic aperture radar measurements for ocean and coastal applications.

Dr. Silvia Merlino, physicist. Degree from the University of Pisa; PhD in Astrophysics and Elementary Particles at the University of Granada-Spain; Post-Doc at the University of Parma and then Researcher initially at the INFM-National Institute for the Physics of Matter (2001 - 2009), and currently at the ISMAR (Institute of Marine Science) Institute of CMR. Her main scientific activities include physical oceanography and the study of coastal dynamic processes of different types (erosion, spread of alien plants, distribution and rate of accumulation of anthropogenic wastes on beaches), and on that of degradation processes and adsorption of pollutants by macro and micro plastics present in the marine environment. She has authored and co-authored more than 150 scientific publications, conference proceedings and multimedia courses, some of which have won national and international awards. She was responsible for communication activities as CNR representative in the Joint Research Unit of the EMSO research infrastructure. She is currently the ISMAR representative of CNR's Pianosa Research Base. She won the CNR Biblioteca Marconi award for citizen science in 2023 with the "SeaCleaner" project.

Giulia Buttazzoni, (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. Degree (summa cum laude) in Telecommunication Engineering and the Ph.D. Degree in Information Engineering from the University of Trieste (Italy), in 2008 and 2013, respectively. In 2014 she joined the Department of Engineering and Architecture (DIA) of the University of Trieste, where she is currently Associate Professor in Electromagnetic Fields and Antennas. She is member of SIEM (Italian Electromagnetics Society) and CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications). Her main research activity concerns antenna array synthesis techniques and numerical methods for electromagnetic fields.

Giuseppe Grieco, is at the Istituto di Scienze Marine of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche since May 2021. He got his master degree in “Scienze Nautiche – Indirizzo Oceanografico” from the Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope and his PhD in Environmental Engineering from the Università degli Studi della Basilicata. Since 2014, his main scientific interests are related to the estimation of the sea state and the wind field from active microwave sensors, namely Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs), scatterometers and GNSS-Reflectometry. He carried out this activity at the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (ICM-CSIC), and now at ISMAR. In the past he was involved in scientific activities aimed at retrieving the thermodynamic state of the atmosphere and some minor and trace gases tropospheric concentration from hyper-spectral measurements such as those acquired by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) and similar instruments.