Activity

The OPENCoastS service assembles on-demand circulation forecast systems for selected coastal areas and keeps them running operationally for a period defined by the user. This service generates daily forecasts of water levels and vertically averaged velocities over the region of interest for 48 hours, based on numerical simulations of the relevant physical processes.

The project is a study under Article 3 (d) of the Innovation Support Fund to Encourage Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy and Energy Performance Contracts in the hospitality sector, which aims to effectively support the knowledge of public and private entities in the area of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

The EC-funded project EOSC-hub project started on January 1st 2018, bringing together an extensive group of national and international service providers to create the Hub: a central contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.

The WADI project will develop an airborne water leak detection surveillance service to provide water utilities with adequate information on leaks in water infrastructure outside urban areas, thus enabling prompt and cost-effective repairs.
WADI’s innovative concept consists in coupling and optimising off-the-shelf optical remote sensing devices (multispectral and infrared cameras) and applying them on two complementary aerial platforms (manned and unmanned) in an operational environment. The feasibility of the surveillance service developed by WADI will be tested in real representative conditions through water leak detection campaigns on two pilot sites: Provence region (France) and Alqueva (Portugal).

INCD aims to establish, continuously enhance and operate a larger digital infrastructure to deliver state-of-the-art computing and data services to the wider Portuguese scientific and academic community. It will support research in all scientific domains enabling effective participation in national and international research projects and activities.It is included in the Portuguese Roadmap of Research Infrastructures  of the Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT)

Some of the world most densely populated cities are located in estuarine low-lying areas facing a high risk of inundation with a potential for significant economic costs. The hazards associated with these processes arise from the particular characteristics of those environments, as linking zones between river and ocean systems, and increasing human activity in their marginal and surrounding areas. This point is emphasized by the World Disaster Report that focuses on urban risk, as well as by the European Union's strategy for prevention of natural and anthropic disasters.

The scientific goal of UBEST is to improve the global understanding of the biogeochemical buffering capacity of estuaries and its susceptibility to future scenarios of anthropogenic inputs and climate change. UBEST will effectively support the short and long-term management of these systems. This goal will be achieved by deploying "observatories”, which are emerging tools that integrate process-based numerical models and their results, and in-situ observations. To promote the generalization of the conclusions, two Portuguese estuaries with very distinct characteristics will be assessed, the Ria Formosa and the Tagus estuary.

The main objective of MARSOL is to demonstrate that MAR (Managed Aquifer Recharge) is a sound, safe and sustainable strategy to storage the excess of water in aquifers to be recovered in times of shortage. This contributes to improve inter-annual water resources management, as well as to solve groundwater quality problems.Videos available for MARSOL demo site 2 Algarve, Portugal:

• Demo Site PT1 Campina de Faro Clogging test July 2014
• Demo Site PT2 Cerro do Bardo MAR test April 2016
• Demo Site PT2 SBMessines SAT basins 2016 17
• Demo Site PT3_Melides_Sandbox Model
  

The R&D Project aims to development an autonomous catamaran vessel for surface water monitoring, configurable enough to deal specifically with the Water Framework Directive (WFD) monitoring requirements (European Commission, 2003) established in the European River Basin Management Plans (RBMP).

Since the fixed monitoring sites can only offer a restricted sampling of the water body conditions, we have developed an innovative autonomous robotic vessel capable to observe and measure water quality and hydromorphological elements on rivers, estuaries and reservoirs. This platform was conceived to be used in narrow (a few meters) to large systems and in a variety of depths, having the ability to monitor obstacles and handles sharp bathymetric, geometric and hydrodynamic variations.

The R&D project SI-GeA aims at developing an intelligent system for monitoring and decision support in real time of all the relevant information for the management of urban systems for sewage and stormwater, including gravitational collectors, pumping systems and treatment plants. This information comes from remote monitoring networks, operational data from said networks and real-time forecasting systems of the behavior of infrastructures and media receivers. The system will be designed to meet the requirements of frequent use of information by managers, allowing as well the creation of products on demand in real time.

Goals
The main aims of this project are to: (i) develop a set of high resolution operational oceanographic systems in s everal estuaries or ports located in the Atlantic Area, and (ii) establish local oil spill response plans for these local areas based on risk as sessment. To achieve these goals the project include the following activities which are defined in much more detail in Section 5: (1) preparation, (2) project management, (3) development of a set of high resolution operational oceanographic systems, (4) development of a set of high resolution operational oil spill forecast systems, (5) development of a risk assessment system, (6) development of local oil spill response plans and (7) a communication plan. In order to manage and distribute the work, some of the partners will lead specific activities due to their wide experience in a concrete field. Nevertheless, they will count on with the collaboration of one or more of the other partners depending on their skills.

Pilot testing of the methodology for early warning of health risks from faecal contamination in recreational waters will be done by integration of a coupled hydrodynamic-faecal contamination model for the Algés-Alcântara section of the Tagus estuary with the real time CSO monitoring in the same area. The pilot system will be prepared to provide early warnings, derived from real time now- and forecasts contamination model simulations. Such warnings could be used as a basis for the immediate management for reducing the health risk – and equally important – to provide information concerning when the event is expected to be over.

The goals of PAC:MAN are to investigate:

• past accident data to develop environmental indicators of spill-prone atmospheric and oceanographic conditions in the Iberian shelf and to validate them in a coastal system;
• the usefulness of high-accuracy modelling systems for risk prevention and early-warning, including the relevant processes in a coastal oil spill;
• the feasibility, advantages and scalability of an alert system based on recent communication technologies;

the usefulness of information technology systems to integrate and provide relevant environmental information on the ecological elements at risk, and to assess how these innovative aspects can be integrated in a risk management early-warning and alert system for spill accidents in coastal regions.

G-cast aims at combining the novel computational resources provided by Grid computing and the team expertise in the use of existing state-of-the-art numerical models to develop an exploratory analysis of the impact of climate changes on the long-term morphodynamic evolution of coastal zones. This goal will be achieved through

• the adaptation of a suite of models within an existing morphodynamic modeling system to Grid-computing environment;
• the integration of this modeling system in a nowcast-forecast computational system adapted for the Portuguese coast, and
• its exploratory application to the analysis of climate change in the long-term morphodynamic dynamics of two contrasting coastal systems: the Óbidos lagoon and the Aveiro lagoon.

A research proposal between the National Civil Engineering Laboratory (LNEC, Portugal) and the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU, U.S.A.) is briefly presented, to support the development of the existing partnership between these two institutions. This proposal aims to integrate complementary research strengths at the two institutions to improve and validate a sophisticated ecological modeling system for operational forecasting of ecosystem dynamics based on grid computing resources. The Portuguese partner will provide the ecological model and the expertise on grid-enabling of numerical models. The American partner will provide the expertise on parallel computing and the benchmark for validation and inter-model comparison. The specific goals of the project are:

• to parallelize and grid-enable the ecological modeling system;
• to validate and assess the performance of the modeling system in a coastal benchmark, based on the wealth of data collected in the coastal observatory of the Columbia river estuary and plume, and
• to reinforce existing working collaborations and to establish a long-term relationship between the two institutions, through the identification of long-term funding mechanisms for common research goals.