SeaConditions: Present and future sea conditions for safer navigation (www.sea-conditions.com)

Sea Situational Awareness (SSA) is strategically important for management purposes of Italian Seas and coastal areas. The lack of adequate dissemination of marine environmental data and consequent poor knowledge available for operations at sea reduce the response capacity, leading to loss of lives and potential socio-economic damages. The SSA topic is being addressed by "TESSA", an industrial research project funded under the PON "Ricerca & Competitivita 2007–2013" program of Ministero Italiano dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita' e della Ricerca. TESSA is a joint effort of research groups of operational oceanography and scientific computing, and aims to strengthen and consolidate the operational oceanography service and to integrate it with advanced technological platforms in order to disseminate information for the SSA. The first product of TESSA is “SeaConditions”, a public service providing ocean and weather forecasts for the Mediterranean Sea, on the web and mobile applications. Every day, forecasts are produced by operational services, such as the Mediterranean Monitoring and Forecasting Center (www.myocean.eu) for the ocean variables and ECMWF for the atmospheric variables. The service delivers detailed information with high spatial and temporal resolution. Main variables displayed on Google Maps are: bathymetry, weather and oceanographic forecasts and satellite ocean colour data. Ocean forecasts are given at different resolution since nested limited area models for Mediterranean sub-regions are also displayed. SeaConditions provides a user friendly interface with zoom and drag Google Maps' features allowing to display data with different levels of details. SeaConditions' main strength is to provide a single point of access to meteo-marine forecasts, which are based on advanced oceanographic models, remote sensing products and bathymetry, and to deliver high quality information. The SeaConditions products are available through web and mobile channels. The web portal www.sea-conditions.com is compatible with all modern web-browsers on all operating systems. For the mobile users, APPs were also developed to consider the different kind of screens and gesture/interactions. The APPs are available on AppleStore and Google Play.