CONNECT - Local coastal monitoring service for Portugal

Abstract

This report proposes two cross-cutting methodologies for joint exploitation of information for monitoring and modeling in coastal regions taking advantage of the products developed and enhanced in the scope of the CONNECT project, namely the CONNECT coastal service (Rodrigues et al., 2024). The workflow for their implementation is demonstrated in the Tagus estuary taking advantage of the results of this project. The proposed cases are: 1) a methodology for establishing forecast system grid limits based on the information provided by the in-situ and remote networks; and 2) a methodology to support monitoring infrastructures. The analyses are conducted in a generic way, to be applied anywhere, and are then illustrated using the model forecasts and the in-situ and remote sensing data available at the CoastNet monitoring network (Castellanos et al. 2021; França et al. 2021). The demonstration sites, initially selected to be the Mondego estuary and Ria Formosa, were switched to the Tagus estuary. Indeed, while both the Tagus and the Mondego estuaries have a similar in-situ network, their spatial scales are quite different (the Tagus estuary is much larger), and the application of the methodology using the available remote sensing data would be less effective in the Mondego. In the case of the Ria Formosa, in-situ data is not currently available for the relevant variables. Therefore, both methodologies will be demonstrated in the Tagus estuary.