On April 2002, just after one year since its recovery into a dockyard in Genoa, due to the breaking of the mooring, the meteo-oceanographic buoy "ODAS Italia 1", managed by the branch in Genoa of Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per l'Automazione, regained the sea. It was positioned at the centre of the Ligurian Sea on about 1400 m deep sea bottom, approximately at 73 Km southward from Genoa along the line with Cape Corse.
The research project developed around the system "ODAS Italia 1", conceived as the platform in open sea and the shore station linked by bi-directional telemetry, mainly concerns two aspects: the first one, technological and methodological, related to the development of instrumentation and systems for the marine environmental monitoring in a broad range, the other one with an oceanographic and ecological orientation for describing the area in which the buoy operates and its issues. These activities allow multidisciplinary groups to benefit by the ODAS platform, contributing to its exploitation. The onboard system collects and transmits to the shore station the measurements of the basic meteorological (atmospheric pressure, air temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation and precipitation) and marine (water temperature, current speed and direction, wave height and direction by means of an acoustic system) parameters.
The prominent characteristics of the "buoy system" can be summarised as follows:
1. the capacity of integrating measurements acquired by the onboard system, including the data about the trim of the buoy and the swell, and of using redundancy and correlation to evaluate the reliability of the measurements, thus, eventually, issuing warnings;
2. the possibility of changing the acquisition parameters, even in autonomic way, for a period of time or one and for all, based on the type of phenomena to be measured or on the status of the power supply of the buoy;
3. the expandability of the measuring system able to host onboard also instrumentation under testing or autonomous equipment for long tests in open sea conditions.
The European Union promotes concerted actions in order to understand better the complex processes that govern the environment and, within this context, the participation to the European project "Mediterranean Forecasting System: Toward Environmental Predictions", starting in the next future, demonstrates how the buoy represents an important resource attracting prominent researches and cooperative efforts.
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