Special Session 6

SPECIAL SESSION #6

Andrea Buono

Parthenope University of Naples, Italy

• andrea.buono@uniparthenope.it

Giuseppe Grieco

ISMAR - National Research Council

• giuseppe.grieco@cnr.it

Lucio Mascolo

Universitat de Valencia

• lucio.mascolo@uv.es

We live in a coastal world, where about 360 million km2 of water and 150 million km2 of land area continuously and significantly interact each other along the more than 1,600,000 km of global coastline. In addition, more than 80% of the countries worldwide have a coastline, either with the open oceans, inland water bodies or both. The climatological and geomorphological characteristics of the coastal areas vary hugely across the world giving rise to different vegetation, marine and socio-economic ecosystems. The latter are shaped day by day as induced by both natural and anthropogenic processes that alter the dynamics of coastal regions.

The ever-increasing spatio-temporal variability of coastal regions pushed the need of getting accurate and update information at different scale, which can be generated using satellite remote sensing technologies as the main source. The valuable role played by radar measurements and optical imagery in obtaining useful information for an improved coastal area planning and a smart water resource management has been unambiguously recognized. Nevertheless, from one side they can get benefits from advanced modeling and analysis tools that aim at improving the quality of the generated added-value products; from the other side, new products can be generated by using advanced processing method - based on data fusion and machine learning approaches – starting from high-quality measurements.

Therefore, this Special Session aims at collecting novel contributions in the field of satellite observation of inland water bodies and coastal regions, welcoming original contributions from the metrology for the sea community involved in the following research topics: analysis of coastal dynamics induced by natural hazards and anthropogenic factors, coastal sustainability, oil and plastic marine pollution, wind and current fields, shoreline erosion, detection and classification of natural and man-made targets, retrieval of sea and wave parameters, management of water resources, water quality. The above-mentioned list is not comprehensive and original contributions to related topics are also welcome to boost a joint integrated approach to the observation of coastal environments and inland water bodies.

Main topics for this Special Session include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling tools to improve satellite data and product quality;
• In-situ and proximity sensing measurements to support satellite data and product enhancement;
• Processing tools to generate added-value products from satellite imagery;
• Calibration and validation campaigns.

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.

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.

Lucio Mascolo received the Ph.D. degree in “Electronic and Information Engineering” (curriculum electromagnetic fields) from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy, in 2015. His research interests involve electromagnetic modeling of polarimetric radar measurements whose application mainly focuses on agriculture monitoring but also include land/sea discrimination for coastal monitoring.
He carried out his research at the Electromagnetics and Remote Sensing Group, Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, Italy, from 2015 to 2016; at SarVision, The Netherlands, from 2016 to 2018; Digital Content Analysis Technology (DCAT), U.K., from 2019 to 2020. In Spain, he joined the Signals, Systems and Telecommunicaion Group, at University of Alicante, and the Global Change Unit at the University of Valencia, in 2020 and 2023, respectively.