The Center (CMMMA, Center for Monitoring and Modelling for Marine and Atmosphere applications, aka meteo@uniparthenope) was born from decades of experience in the field of modeling, measurement and computational simulation in the marine and atmospheric environment of the Department of Environmental Sciences (DiSAM) and of the Department of Applied Sciences (DSA) of the University of Naples Parthenope, already Naval University Institute, which since 2013 have merged with the Department of Science and Technology.
The Center was funded by the University of Naples Parthenope with financial resources obtained from the Campania Region in the context of the L.R. n.13 2009 (Project PROMETEO / TASK 1). The director of the Center is Prof. Giulio Giunta and the scientific coordinator is Prof. Giorgio Budillon, computer services and computational resources are managed by prof. Raffaele Montella.
CMMMA offers its services of weather, marine and air quality forecast to common people, local government, research institutions, business companies, environmental and health assessment companies, yachting control authority, sporting partnerships, and others. The data provided by the Center is available on the official web page http://meteo.uniparthenope.it.
From this perspective, CMMMA commits to provide high resolution weather forecast for the America's Cup World Series event in Napoli on April 7-15th 2012 in a new dedicated website section. In particular, wind speed and direction forecasts are produced with up to 250m resolutions on the racecourse, using the model chain and computational resource available to CMMMA. It is relevant to underline that this is the highest resolution achievable with current forecast technologies.
CMMMA monitors the Gulf of Napoli area through a data acquisition network with various weather stations. A CODAR radar system determines the surface ocean current and, for the first time in Campania, a next generation weather radar on Castel Sant’Elmo which can determine an approaching storm front and its evolution on the area of the Gulf of Napoli with 300m resolution.
The Center uploads the results of its numerical weather predictions on an interactive user interface. Moreover, the data is compatible with professional navigation tools (Grib), scientific software (OpenDAP) and 3D visualization in the Google Earth browser (KML).
Mobile Android apps are available and application-programming interfaces will be provided to allow the development of new applications in the smart cities project.