scholarly journals Wave Farms Impact on the Coastal Processes—A Case Study Area in the Portuguese Nearshore

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 262
Author(s):  
Florin Onea ◽  
Liliana Rusu ◽  
Gabriel Bogdan Carp ◽  
Eugen Rusu

The aim of the present work is to identify the expected nearshore and offshore impact of a marine energy farm that would be implemented in the coastal environment of Portugal. Several layouts of Wave Dragon devices were considered, the distance between each system being gradually adjusted. By processing 27–years of combined wave data coming from the European Space Agency and ERA5, the most relevant conditions have been identified. The centre of each farm layout was set to approximately 3.5 km from the coast, where a more significant attenuation of wave heights in the middle of the target area was noticed, which can go up to 16% in the case of extreme events. From the analysis of the longshore currents, it was noticed that even an arrow farm layout defined by five systems may have a significant impact, by changing the peak or by smoothing the currents profile. Wave energy is an emerging renewable sector that can also contribute tocoastal protection and, therefore, the Portuguese coast represents a suitable candidate for this type of project.

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Russo

Mars Express is the first planetary mission accomplished by the European Space Agency (ESA). Launched in early June 2003, the spacecraft entered Mars's orbit on Christmas day of that year, demonstrating the new European commitment to planetary exploration. Following a failed attempt in the mid-1980s, two valid proposals for a European mission to Mars were submitted to ESA's decision-making bodies in the early 1990s, in step with renewed international interest in Mars exploration. Both were rejected, however, in the competitive selection process for the agency's Science Programme. Eventually, the Mars Express proposal emerged during a severe budgetary crisis in the mid-1990s as an exemplar of a “flexible mission” that could reduce project costs and development time. Its successful maneuvering through financial difficulties and conflicting scientific interests was due to the new management approach as well as to the public appeal of Mars exploration. In addition to providing a case study in the functioning of the ESA's Science Programme, the story of Mars Express discussed in this paper provides a case study in the functioning of the European Space Agency's Science Programme and suggests some general considerations on the peculiar position of space research in the general field of the history of science and technology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
Paul Macarof ◽  
Florian Statescu ◽  
Cristian Iulian Birlica ◽  
Paul Gherasim

In this study was analyzed zones affected by drought using Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), that is based on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). This fact, drought, is one of the most wide -spread and least understood natural phenomena. In this paper was used remote sensing (RS) data, kindly provided by The European Space Agency (ESA), namely Sentinel-2 (S-2) Multispectral Instrument (MSI) and wellkonwn images Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). The RS images was processed in SNAP and ArcMap. Study Area, was considered the eastern of Iasi county. The main purpose of paper was to investigating if Sentinel images can be used for VCI analysis.


Author(s):  
SÉRGIO AGOSTINHO ◽  
ANA MOREIRA ◽  
ANDRÉ MARQUES ◽  
JOÃO ARAÚJO ◽  
RICARDO FERREIRA ◽  
...  

Aspect-oriented software development claims to improve several software engineering principles, such as modularization, abstraction and composition. The Aspect for the Space Domain project (ASSD) developed a metadata-driven approach for aspect-oriented requirements analysis. The main objectives of the ASSD project, funded by the European Space Agency , were to study the applicability and usefulness of aspect-orientation for the space domain (ground segment software projects in particular), focusing on the early stages of the software development life cycle. Therefore, this paper describes a rigorous representation for requirements analysis concepts, refines an approach for handling early aspects, and proposes a client/server architecture based on a metadata repository. The ASSD approach has been validated with two space domain case studies.


Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 2303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Onea ◽  
Rusu

Coastal areas are defined by numerous opportunities and threats. Among them we can mention emerging renewable projects and on the other hand coastal erosion. In the present work, the impact of a generic wind–wave farm on the nearshore waves and currents in the vicinity of the Porto Ferro inlet (northwest Sardinia) was assessed. Using a reanalysis wave dataset that covers a 40-year interval (1979–2018), the most relevant wave characteristics in the target area were identified. These can reach during winter a maximum value of 7.35 m for the significant wave height. As a next step, considering a modeling system that combines a wave model (simulating waves nearshore (SWAN)) and a surf model, the coastal impact of some generic marine energy farms defined by a transmission coefficient of 25% was assessed. According to the results corresponding to the reference sites and lines defined close to the shore, it becomes obvious that there is a clear attenuation in terms of significant wave heights, and as regards current velocities, although the general tendency for them to decrease, there are, however, some situations when the values of the nearshore current velocities can also decrease. Finally, we can mention that the presence of a marine energy farm seems to be beneficial for the beach stability in this particular coastal environment, and in some cases the transformation of the breaking waves from plunging to spilling is noticed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 1560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marios Tzouvaras ◽  
Chris Danezis ◽  
Diofantos G. Hadjimitsis

Infrastructure is operational under normal circumstances and is designed to cope with common natural disruptions such as rainfall and snow. Natural hazards can lead to severe problems at the areas where such phenomena occur, but also at neighboring regions as they can make parts of a road network virtually impassable. Landslides are one of the most devastating natural hazards worldwide, triggered by various factors that can be monitored via ground-based and/or satellite-based techniques. Cyprus is in an area of high susceptibility to such phenomena. Currently, extensive field campaigns including geotechnical drilling investigations and geophysical excavations are conducted to monitor land movements, and, at the same time, determine the geological suitability of areas. Active satellite remote sensors, namely Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), have been widely used for detecting and monitoring landslides and other ground deformation phenomena using Earth Observation based techniques. This paper aims to demonstrate how the use of Copernicus open-access and freely distributed datasets along with the exploitation of the open-source processing software SNAP (Sentinel’s Application Platform), provided by the European Space Agency, can be used for landslide detection, as in the case study near Pissouri, where a landslide was triggered by heavy rainfall on 15 February 2019, which caused a major disturbance to everyday commuters since the motorway connecting the cities of Limassol and Paphos remained closed for more than a month. The Coherent Change Detection (CCD) methodology was applied successfully by detecting the phenomenon under study accurately, using two indicators (the coherence difference and the normalized coherence difference). Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis was carried out to measure their performance with the coherence difference having an overall accuracy of 93% and the normalized coherence difference having an overall accuracy of 94.8% for detecting the landslide and non-landslide areas. The probability of landslide detection was 63.2% in the case of the coherence difference and increased to 73.7% for the normalized coherence difference, whereas the probability of false alarm for both indicators was approximately 1%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 575
Author(s):  
Anna Spinosa ◽  
Alex Ziemba ◽  
Alessandra Saponieri ◽  
Leonardo Damiani ◽  
Ghada El Serafy

Remote sensing and satellite imagery have become commonplace in efforts to monitor and model various biological and physical characteristics of the Earth. The land/water interface is a continually evolving landscape of high scientific and societal interest, making the mapping and monitoring thereof particularly important. This paper aims at describing a new automated method of shoreline position detection through the utilization of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images derived from European Space Agency satellites, specifically the operational SENTINEL Series. The resultant delineated shorelines are validated against those derived from video monitoring systems and in situ monitoring; a mean distance of 1 and a maximum of 3.5 pixels is found.


Author(s):  
Claudio Miccoli ◽  
Alessandro Turchi ◽  
Pierre Schrooyen ◽  
Domenic D’Ambrosio ◽  
Thierry Magin

AbstractThis work deals with the analysis of the cork P50, an ablative thermal protection material (TPM) used for the heat shield of the qarman Re-entry CubeSat. Developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) at the von Karman Institute (VKI) for Fluid Dynamics, qarman is a scientific demonstrator for Aerothermodynamic Research. The ability to model and predict the atypical behavior of the new cork-based materials is considered a critical research topic. Therefore, this work is motivated by the need to develop a numerical model able to respond to this demand, in preparation to the post-flight analysis of qarman. This study is focused on the main thermal response phenomena of the cork P50: pyrolysis and swelling. Pyrolysis was analyzed by means of the multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code argo, developed at Cenaero. Based on a unified flow-material solver, the Volume Averaged Navier–Stokes (VANS) equations were numerically solved to describe the interaction between a multi-species high enthalpy flow and a reactive porous medium, by means of a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin Method (DGM). Specifically, an accurate method to compute the pyrolysis production rate was implemented. The modeling of swelling was the most ambitious task, requiring the development of a physical model accounting for this phenomenon, for the purpose of a future implementation within argo. A 1D model was proposed, mainly based on an a priori assumption on the swelling velocity and the resolution of a nonlinear advection equation, by means of a Finite Difference Method (FDM). Once developed, the model was successfully tested through a matlab code, showing that the approach is promising and thus opening the way to further developments.


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