Giuseppe Ciraolo

Università degli Studi di Palermo | UNIPA · Department of Engineering

River flow monitoring has recently experienced rapid development due to advancements in optical methods, which are non-intrusive and enhance safety conditions for operators. Surface velocity fields are obtained recording and analyzing displacements of floating tracer materials, artificially introduced or already present on the water surface. River...

In the last decades, the frequency of extreme weather and marine events has drastically increased. During the last week of October 2021 an intense Mediterranean hurricane (Medicane), named Apollo, affected many countries on the Mediterranean coasts. Eight people died as a consequence of the floodings from the cyclone in the countries of Tunisia, Al...

In this work, we study a Mediterranean cyclone, that was called Helios and took place during the period 9–11 February 2023 in the southeastern part of Sicily and Malta Island, by a multiparametric approach combining microseism results with sea state and meteorological data provided by wavemeter buoy, HF Radar, hindcast maps and satellite SEVIRI ima...

In recent decades, coastal erosion phenomena have increased due to climate change. The increased frequency and intensity of extreme events and the poor sediment supply by anthropized river basins (dams, river weirs, culverts, etc.) have a crucial role in coastal erosion. Therefore, an integrated analysis of coastal erosion is crucial to produce det...

Accurate estimations of actual crop evapotranspiration are of utmost importance to evaluate crop water requirements and to optimize water use efficiency. At this aim, coupling simple agro-hydrological models, such as the well-known FAO-56 model, with remote observations of the land surface could represent an easy-to-use tool to identify biophysical...

i-waveNET project is deploying measurement networks of the sea state in the Mediterranean. Several marine monitoring technologies will be integrated. In particular, HF radar, wave-buoys, seismographs, and tide gauges will be integrated with numerical models establishing a new integrated monitoring system. All the information provided will be analyz...

The opportunity of using wave energy converter arrays in a hot spot area of the Mediterranean sea was investigated. For this purpose, numerical simulations of wave energy converters together with a simple cost-effective analysis were carried out. The selected study area is one of the most energetic inside the Sicilian channel (Italy). The numerical...

Shoreline evolution studies are fundamental to assess the rate of beach accretion or retreatment. In the last years, researchers developed many methods with several techniques belonging to different disciplines and backgrounds. Nowadays, the Shoreline Change Analysis (SCA) is the most widespread method to assess shoreline evolution. In fact, the SC...

Due to the semi-enclosed nature of the Mediterranean Sea, natural disasters and anthropogenic activities impose stronger pressures on its coastal ecosystems than in any other sea of the world. With the aim of responding adequately to science priorities and societal challenges, littoral waters must be effectively monitored with high-frequency radar...

The Mediterranean Sea is a prominent climatechange hot spot, with many socioeconomically vital coastal areas being the most vulnerable targets for maritime safety, diverse met-ocean hazards and marine pollution. Providing an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution at wide coastal areas, high-frequency radars (HFRs) have been steadily gaining...

Due to the semi-enclosed nature of the Mediterranean Sea, natural disasters and anthropogenic activities impose stronger pressures on its coastal ecosystems than in any other sea of the world. With the aim of responding adequately to science priorities and societal challenges, littoral waters must be effectively monitored with high-frequency radar...

Soil moisture (SM) is an essential element in the hydrological cycle influencing land-atmosphere interactions and rainfall-runoff processes. Quantification of the spatial and temporal behaviour of SM at field scale is vital for understanding water availability in agriculture, ecosystems research, river basin hydrology and water resources management...

The Ionian sea is prone to tsunamis due to its proximity to the Calabrian subduction zone, which is one of the major tsunamigenic areas of the Mediterranean. The tsunami disaster risk is, nowadays, significantly higher due to the increased exposure of buildings as a result of the economic and touristic growth of the Mediterranean coastal areas. Thi...

Technological advances over last decades gave an innovative impulse to the development of new streamflow measurements techniques, especially regarding remote flow monitoring methods that allow for non-intrusive measurements. The most widely used image-based techniques are the optical ones, such as Large-Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LS-PIV) and...

The Mediterranean Sea is a prominent climate change hot spot, being their socio-economically vital coastal areas the most vulnerable targets for maritime safety, diverse met-ocean hazards and marine pollution. Providing an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution at wide coastal areas, High-frequency radars (HFRs) have been steadily gaining re...

Due to the semi-enclosed nature of the Mediterranean Sea, natural disasters and anthropogenic activities impose stronger pressures on its coastal ecosystems than in any other sea of the world. With the aim of responding adequately to science priorities and societal challenges, littoral waters must be effectively monitored with High-Frequency radar...

Valorisation and sustainable exploitation of woody biomass from cultivation interventions might be an important opportunity to track alternative development trails for rural communities in natural protected areas. The governance of Mediterranean protected areas is characterized by overlapping, sometimes conflicting institutions, stakeholders and reg...

Spatial resolution is a key parameter in energy–water surface flux modelling. In this research, scale effects are analyzed on fluxes modelled with the FEST-EWB model, by upscaling both its inputs and outputs separately. The main questions are: (a) if high-resolution remote sensing images are necessary to accurately model a heterogeneous area; and (...

In the original article [...]

Water infiltration rate (WIR) into the soil profile was investigated through a comprehensive study harnessing spectral information of the soil surface. As soil spectroscopy provides invaluable information on soil attributes, and as WIR is a soil surface-dependent property, field spectroscopy may model WIR better than traditional laboratory spectral...

Several methods have been developed to map soil water content exploiting data in the short and long wave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Among these, the thermal inertia is one of the most widely used. Over the last years, optical and thermal cameras were sufficiently miniaturized to be loaded onboard of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs), whi...

20 Imagery acquired from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is used nowadays more 21 often than ever before in a wide range of disciplines and research fields. In this work 22 we explored the use of UAV data in deriving very high spatial resolution maps of 23 evaporative fraction (EF) and surface soil moisture (SSM) by applying the so-called 24 "simpl...

Soil moisture (SM) is an essential element in the hydrological cycle influencing land-atmosphere interactions and rainfall-runoff processes. High-resolution mapping of SM at field scale is vital for understanding spatial and temporal behavior of water availability in agriculture. Unmanned Arial Systems (UAS) offer an extraordinary opportunity to br...

Recent advances in image-based methods for environmental monitoring are opening new frontiers for remote streamflow measurements in natural environments. Such techniques offer numerous advantages compared to traditional approaches. Despite the wide availability of cost-effective devices and software for image processing, these techniques are still...

2020): Exploring the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with the simplified 'triangle' technique for soil water content and evaporative fraction retrievals in a Mediterranean setting, International Journal of Remote Sensing, ABSTRACT Information acquired from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is frequently used nowadays in a variety of discipline...

Around 350 million tonnes of plastics are annually produced worldwide. A remarkable percentage of these products is dispersed in the environment, finally reaching and dispersed in the marine environment. Recent field surveys detected microplastics’ concentrations in the Mediterranean Sea. The most commonly polymers found were polyethylene, polyprop...

Tsunamis are among the most dangerous natural disasters for coastal areas experiencing tsunami hazard. One of the major concerns in the assessment of strategies for the risk mitigation is to estimate vulnerability of structures and infrastructures. However, reliable approaches for the evaluation of the structural capacity under tsunami loads are no...

This paper addresses the tsunami propagation and subsequent coastal areas flooding by means of a depth-integrated numerical model. Such an approach is fundamental in order to assess the inundation hazard in coastal areas generated by seismogenic tsunami. In this study we adopted, an interdisciplinary approach, in order to consider the tsunami propa...

Quantification of the spatial and temporal behavior of soil moisture is vital for understanding water availability in agriculture, ecosystems research, river basin hydrology, and water resources management. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) offer great potential in monitoring this parameter at a sub-meter level and at a relatively low cost. The standar...

Since the turn of the century, rubber plantations have been expanding their footprint across Southeast Asia in response to an increasing global demand for rubber products. Between 2000 and 2014, the area cultivated with rubber more than doubled. It is not clear how this major change in the agricultural landscape of Southeast Asia, the main area of...

Human occupation along coastal areas has been greatly increasing in recent decades and, in many places, human activities and infrastructures are threatened by erosion processes that can produce relevant economic and human losses. In order to reduce such impacts and design sound management strategies, which can range from the “no action” to the “pro...

Among the indirect estimation approaches of soil water content in the upper layer of the soil, the “triangle method” is one of the most common that relies on the simple relationship between the optical and thermal features sensed via Earth Observation. These features are controlled by water content at the surface and within the root zone but also b...

The EU Water-JPI project titled “An integrative information aqueduct to close the gaps between global satellite observation of water cycle and local sustainable management of water resources – iAQUEDUCT” aims primarily at closing the gaps between remote observations of water cycle and local needs of information for sustainable management of water r...

This paper investigates wave climate and storm characteristics along the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, for the period 1979–2014, by means of the analysis of wave data on four prediction points obtained from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Normally, to characterize storms, researchers use the so-called “power inde...

A network of High-Frequency radar (HFR) stations runs operationally in the Malta-Sicily Channel (MSC), Central Mediterranean Sea, providing sea surface current maps with high temporal (1 h) and spatial (3 × 3 km) resolutions since August 2012. Comparisons with surface drifter data and near-surface Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) observatio...

This paper presents the estimation of the wave energy potential around the Aegadian islands (Italy), carried out on the basis of high resolution wave hindcast. This reanalysis was developed employing Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) and WAVEWATCH III ® models for the modelling of the atmosphere and the waves, respectively. Wave climate has been...

This paper presents the estimation of the wave energy potential around the Aegadian islands (Italy), carried out on the basis of high resolution wave hindcast. This reanalysis was developed employing Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) and WAVEWATCH IIIR models for the modelling of the atmosphere and the waves, respectively. Wave climate has been d...

Remote sensing techniques allow monitoring the Earth surface and acquiring worthwhile information that can be used efficiently in agro-hydrological systems. Satellite images associated to computational models represent reliable resources to estimate actual evapotranspiration fluxes, ET a , based on surface energy balance. The knowledge of ET a and...

The CALYPSO HF radar network is a permanent and fully operational observing system currently composed of four CODAR SeaSonde stations. The system is providing real-time hourly maps of sea surface currents and waves data in the Malta-Sicily Channel. The present work aims to compare significant wave height measurements by HF Radar to wave data from n...

Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems; enhancing the understanding of hydrological processes; optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources; and assessing, forecasting, and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data co...

Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems, enhancing the understanding hydrological processes, optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources, and assessing, forecasting and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data collec...

Chlorophyll-a (CHL-a) and sea surface temperature (SST) are generally accepted as proxies for water quality. They can be easily retrieved in a quasi-near real time mode through satellite remote sensing and, as such, they provide an overview of the water quality on a synoptic scale in open waters. Their distributions evolve in space and time in resp...

Actual evapotranspiration is assessed via surface energy balance at an hourly rate. However, a robust estimation of daily evapotranspiration from hourly values is required. Outcomes of surface energy balance are frequently determined via measures of eddy covariance latent heat flux. Surface energy balance can be applied on images acquired at differ...

To promote the advancement of novel observation techniques that may lead to new sources of information to help better understand the hydrological cycle, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) established the Measurements and Observations in the XXI century (MOXXI) Working Group in July 2013. The group comprises a growing comm...

Satellite imagery allows the observation of large land stretches and the acquisition of worthwhile information that can be used efficaciously in agro-hydrologic systems. On the other hand, remotely sensed data coupled with energy balance models represent reliable tools to estimate actual evapotranspiration (ET). Objective of the research was to pro...

The knowledge of soil water content (SWC) dynamics in the upper soil layer is important for several hydrological processes. Due to the difficulty of assessing the spatial and temporal SWC dynamics in the field, some model-based approaches have been proposed during the last decade. The main objective of this work was to assess the performance of two...

In recent decades in the Mediterranean Sea, high anthropic pressure from increasing economic and touristic development has affected several coastal areas. Today the erosion phenomena threaten human activities and existing structures, and interdisciplinary studies are needed to better understand actual coastal dynamics. Beach evolution analysis can...

The knowledge of spatial and temporal variability of soil water content and others soil-vegetation variables (leaf area index, fractional cover) assumes high importance in crop management. Where and when the cloudiness limits the use of optical and thermal remote sensing techniques, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has proven to have several...

In the last decades in the Mediterranean sea, high anthropic pressure from increasing economic and touristic development has affected several coastal areas. Today the erosion phenomena threaten human activities and existing structures, and interdisciplinary studies are needed to better understand actual coastal dynamics. Beach evolution analysis ca...

Among indirect estimations of the soil water content in the upper layer, the "triangle method" is based on the relationship between the optical and thermal features sensed via Earth Observation. These features are controlled by water content at surface and within root zone, but also by meteorological forcing including air temperature and humidity,...

The ongoing unrest at the Campi Flegrei caldera (CFc) in southern Italy is prompting exploration of its poorly studied offshore sector. We report on a multidisciplinary investigation of the Secca delle Fumose (SdF), a submarine relief known since antiquity as the largest degassing structure of the offshore sector of CFc. We combined high-resolution...

This paper deals with exploitation of the wave radar system for sea surface current estimation in a coastal zone. In particular, we present the results of the processing of the radar data collected by an X-band marine radar installed in Capo Granitola site, which is located in the south-west part of Sicily, on 15 May 2015. The effectiveness of the...

Equations based on surface renewal (SR) analysis to estimate the sensible heat flux (H) require as input the mean ramp amplitude and period observed in the ramp-like pattern of the air temperature measured at high frequency. A SR-based method to estimate sensible heat flux (HSR-LST) requiring only low-frequency measurements of the air temperature,...

Knowledge of soil water content plays a key role in water management efforts to improve irrigation efficiency. Among the indirect estimation methods of soil water content via Earth Observation data is the triangle method, used to analyze optical and thermal features because these are primarily controlled by water content within the near-surface eva...

In this study, spatially distributed estimates of regional actual evapotranspiration (ET) were obtained using a revised procedure of the so called "triangle method" to parameterize the Priestley-Taylor φ coefficient. In the procedure herein proposed, named Time-Domain Triangle Method (TDTM), the triangular feature space was parameterized considerin...

Reference evapotranspiration (ET0) is widely used for irrigation scheduling, to promote an efficient use of water resources for a sustainable agro-ecosystem productivity, as well as to manage water quality and to face other environmental concerns. As suggested by ASCE-EWRI and FAO, standard Penman-Monteith methods are generally applied for an accur...