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MEDESS-4MS, 2012-2015

Development of a local scale prevention and intervention tool in case of an oil spill

Dates	Budget	Funding	Coordinator	Partners
2012-2015	€6,034 K €4,716 K (FEDER) €1,318 K (National co-funding)	European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) National co-funding	Department of Merchant Shipping (Cyprus)	Cedre (France), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy), Decentralized Administration of Crete (Crete), HCMR - Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (Greece), Ifremer (France), Innovamar (Spain), IASA - Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (Greece), ICM - Instituto de Ciencias del Mar – Consejo Superior de Investiga ciones Scientificas (Spain), Instituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (Italy), IOI-Malta Operational Centre - University of Malta (Malta), Italian Coast Guard (Italy), LUISS - Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (Italy), Maritime Safety Department of Montenegro (Montenegro), Météo France (France), Oceanography Center - University of Cyprus (Cyprus), Port Authority of Algeciras Bay (Spain), Port Organisation of Heraklion (Greece), Puertos del Estado (Spain), REMPEC - Regional Marine Pollution Emergency Response Centre for the Mediterranean Sea (Malta), Imedea - Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (Spain)

The MEDESS-4MS project, which was completed at the end of January 2015 after 3 years of development work, was co-funded by ERDF under the MED Programme, a transnational programme of European territorial cooperation.

The project focused on improving oil spill risk prevention in the Mediterranean Sea by developing forecasting and decision support systems. The aim was to integrate various existing oil slick drift models (MOTHY, Medslik, Poseidon) within an operational platform supplied with input data by existing sources of various environmental data: metocean forecasts (GMES/MCS, national organisations, etc.), vessel and spill surveillance at sea (AIS, VTMIS, EMSA-CSN, etc.), sensitivity atlases, spill response equipment data, information on past incidents, etc.

In short, MEDESS-4MS offers a decision support system via a user interface hosted on a web portal, providing interactive access to 3 types of scenarios: real-time (automatic simulations triggered by spills detected on satellite images); delayed mode (offline simulations of past spills, including backtracking); emergency management mode (real-time simulations performed by users).

Designed to meet the requirements of European and non-European agencies (such as EMSA and REMPEC), the platform also aims to contribute to contingency planning and the implementation of European Directive 2005/35/EC (on the identification of ship-source pollution). Since project completion, REMPEC communicated about this project during the spill response exercise and connected regional conference held in May 2015 in Zarziz (Tunisia), initiated by MOIG (Mediterranean Oil Industry Group) and certain national and private oil companies (ETAP, Ecumed, etc.)

Project website: www.medess4ms.eu/