The Use of Geoinformatics in Coastal Atmospheric Transport Phenomena: The Athens Experiment

Theodoros Nitis,Nicolas Moussiopoulos

doi:10.3390/jmse9111197

Abstract

Coastal environment, an area where abrupt changes occur between land and sea, significantly affects the quality of life of a high portion of the Earth’s population. Therefore, the wide range of phenomena observed in coastal areas need to be assessed reliably regarding both data sets and methods applied. In particular, the study of coastal atmospheric transport phenomena which affect a variety of activities in coastal areas, using modeling techniques, demand accurate estimations of a range of meteorological and climatological variables related to the planetary boundary layer. However, the accuracy of such estimations is not obvious. Geoinformatics is able to fill this gap and provide the framework for the design, processing and implementation of accurate geo-databases. This paper aims to highlight the role of geoinformatics in the context of coastal meteorology and climatology. More precisely, it aims to reveal the effect on the performance of a Mesoscale Meteorological Model when a new scheme regarding the input surface parameters is developed using satellite data and application of Geographical Information Systems. The development of the proposed scheme is described and evaluated using the coastal Metropolitan Area of Athens, Greece as a case study. The results indicate a general improvement in the model performance based on the statistical evaluations of three meteorological parameters (temperature, wind speed and wind direction) using four appropriate indicators. The best performance was observed for temperature, then for wind direction and finally for wind speed. The necessity of the proposed new scheme is further discussed.

Highlights

Land-sea interactions observed in coastal areas are quite complex and feed the appearance of phenomena falling within the scientific areas of climatology and meteorology at different spatio-temporal scales [1]
It should be noted here that the diurnal Sea Surface Temperature (SST) data as well as the anthropogenic heat data were excluded from this process, since the performance of the model should be tested using similar parameterizations regarding the Initial and the Enhanced versions [11]; the version compared to Initial version (Iver) was the Surface Parameter Modification Scheme (SPMS) (SPMSver)
In order to achieve the highest credibility of the evaluation, the maximum possible field information was collected from a reliable network of meteorological stations in the study area

Summary

Introduction

Land-sea interactions observed in coastal areas are quite complex and feed the appearance of phenomena falling within the scientific areas of climatology and meteorology at different spatio-temporal scales [1]. The use of geoinformatics in a wide range of applications related to the climatic and meteorological data processing and analysis has increased [3,4,5,6,7]. In the fields of climatology and meteorology, GIS allow for a detailed analysis of different atmospheric parameters by providing specific information regarding weather and climate variability at different spatio-temporal scales [10]. In-situ meteorological observations and/or others acquired from satellite images provide a wide range of information stored in multiple thematic layers, which might be useful for a detailed description of the atmosphere state [11]. The study of the spatio-temporal change of these parameters can be significantly facilitated within a GIS [12]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion