Dallo studio di situazioni meteo e relativi episodi di inquinamento atmosferico in aree costiere e in Italia e Bulgaria verso analisi di data a lungo termine

Responsabili di progetto

Claudia Roberta Calidonna, Maria Petrova Kolarova

Accordo

BULGARIA - BAS - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

Bando

CNR/BAS triennio 2019-2021 2019-2021

Dipartimento

Scienze del sistema terra e tecnologie per l'ambiente

Area tematica

Scienze del sistema Terra e tecnologie per l'ambiente

Stato del progetto

Nuovo

Proposta di ricerca

The Mediterranean region, as stated by the European Environment Agency (EEA, 2012) is one of the regions that have been most deeply affected by climatic change in the last decades due to a raise in temperatures and less precipitations, which is thought to be due to change according to the weather. The main impacts due to climatic change in Europe among others, "the hot spot" (climatic hot spot: a "hot spot" to study the weather, that-is-to say an area that is influenced by climatic change) of the Mediterranean.
Small seas and coastal area such as Mediterranean and the Black Sea coasts register an increasing number of intense precipitations, strong winds and storms in winter and heat waves in summer. Along the two countries coasts most people, of related regions, are settled with a relevant episodes of anthropogenic pressure affecting climate on this areas affecting surrounding environment and its equilibrium.
The proposed study is a deecontinuation of the running project continuing focus on atmospheric processes related to bad air quality in the coastal areas of Italy and Bulgaria, and adding climate studies related the two areas.
Previous activities focused on the investigation of the structure of the atmospheric boundary layer for its role in air quality studies in coastal zones due to intensive circulation.
As results of the running project we carried out some campaigns, in the first two years of the project and the third planned for October 2018, we registered several weather conditions and pollution concentration according to local and synoptic circulation.
Mediterranean coasts are continuously monitored and studied, both for recirculation of pollutant and for their photochemical effect, through the years, while for the Black Sea this problem has not been yet comprehensively addressed, except for national air quality monitoring in cities by Ministry of Environment and Waters.
At the Section of Lamezia Terme of Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC) , since its opening in 2009, research is focused on coastal meteorology with advanced remote sensing techniques to monitor the vertical structure of the coastal boundary layer (Avolio et al, 2011; Federico et al, 2010; 2010 , Calidonna et al. 2015, Calidonna et al 2017).
At ISAC Lamezia Terme is active a climatic environmental I-AMICA observatory, since May 2015 labelled as GAW regional station. Here several chemical-physical parameters are continuously detected: aerosols (from nano to micro particles size) and greenhouse and reactive gases, wind profiles. Most of the active measures are part of the EU Actris Infrastructure programs and the laboratory is one of the National facility of ACTRIS Italian JRU and radiation s, and its related feature are part of the Aeronet (NASA).
Since 2008 at Ahtopol a Scintec sodar operates under collaboration between the meteorological offices of Bulgaria and Russia. This equipment started a valuable observation programme of the coastal boundary layer at the Bulgarian Black Sea shoreline (Barantiev et al, 2011, Batchvarova et al, 2012a and 2012b, Novitky et al, 2012, Tiriolo et al, 2014; Barantiev et al, 2015; Lo Feudo et al, 2015). Since last years dry and wet deposition measurements were performed in Ahtopol and Burgas within the project SAAP4FUTURE (a joint cross-border Bulgaria-Turley study co-financed by the EU).
The ISAC and NIHM research groups cooperate through national and European research projects and networks. A bilateral project "Coastal boundary layer studies based on remote sensing instruments - a parallel between Ahtopol at the Black Sea and Lamezia Terme at the Mediterranean" was conducted in the period 2013-2015. For period 2016-2018 new arguments related to chemical-physical detection and in the context of the project "Study of weather situations related to air pollution episodes in coastal areas in Italy and Bulgaria".
During Ahtopol campaign the ISAC research group brought some mobile equipment such as impactor, particle counter and columnar ozone detector and radiation to collect similar measures such as at Lamezia Terme site.
More campaigns are necessary to collect enough data, also during different seasons and through the years to validate meteo and chemical modeling models to simulate transport conditions during campaigns.
It is important to study variability through years to address climatological studies for both sites.
The present bilateral project will contribute to
- exchange information and experience in running state of the art climate measurements, modelling and data analysis;
- common studies on the parallel between the meteorological, climate and air quality conditions of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea;
- enrichment of the networks in which each group participates with the networks of the other - for example, the Lamezia Terme group will benefit from the ANAS Azerbajan and Department of Physics of University of Sofia cooperations and the NIMH group, collaboration of Department of Science and Technology of University of Naples Partenope and the CNR group.
To secure successful implementation, at each visit in both institutions seminars will be organised and plenary meeting to plan details of the collaboration including:
- Common research topics regarding monitoring programmes, data analysis and modeling activity;
- Scientific plans for the exchange visits;
- Exchanging experience, data analysis and portable instrumentation in intensive experimental campaigns with the monitoring programmes for at least two years of the present project;
- Presenting joint work in conferences and peer reviewed papers.
The scientific problems which will be investigated are:
1) Analysis of weather types related to air pollution episodes and other adverse phenomena thought past year of the running project and during the new project;
2) Climate variable detection at Lamezia Terme and Ahtopol;
3) Modeling reconstruction of campaigns of chemical-physics observations.

Obiettivi della ricerca

The main objectives are:
- to select significant episodes of atmospheric adverse phenomena (anomalies - as possible climate indicators) in the two regions;
- to analyse the meteorological scale situations using stored dataset
- to validate chemical-atmospheric models in reproducing such phenomena for selected cases in the two regions;
- to review relevant transport episodes related to climate affecting factors at Lamezia Terme and Ahtopol;
- to strengthen bilateral collaboration in order to participate in projects for EC funding;
- to built up a network among the young scientists of both teams.

The methodology includes: analysis of collected data, countinously monitored at both sites and during campaigns, on climatological indicators and analysis of local and synoptic situations using whether charts, re-analysis maps and products of numerical forecast; application of models
for the atmospheric dynamics.

Ultimo aggiornamento: 20/04/2024