MELOA is an H2020 project that aims to cover current marine observation gaps, by developing five lines of WAVY drifters - low cost and easy to handle surface drifters designed to collect marine data, from coastal to offshore zones.
The year 2020 was an atypical year for everyone, as a global pandemic emerged with the COVID19. In March, the MELOA team was forced to interrupt the activities involving the development and testing of the WAVY drifters and cancelled all community international events.
Accordingly, an extension of the MELOA project is under consideration. With this extension, the team will hopefully have time enough to achieve all goals set for the development of the family of WAVY drifters.
Despite the challenging year, the team carried out the work on the WAVY software ecosystem, which has been tested on several campaigns executed in the last quarter of 2020. The team also engaged in online events to create awareness and disseminate the results of the project.
Check out the project achievements in the sections below!
WAVY Updates
The MELOA team has been continuously assessing the use cases of the WAVY Basic and WAVY Littoral surface drifters and improving their features. In the meantime, the first WAVY Ocean units were deployed to test the overall performance of the device, after several tests on internal components have proved successful.
MELOA team made available a complete WAVY Software Ecosystem to support the deployment of the WAVY drifters. Such set of tools enables users to configure the WAVY drifters according to their needs, manage the data collected, create different data products, and share their results with the communities! All information needed is now available on MELOA website.
Matias Carandell was distinguished with the second prize of the Student Poster Competition at the IEEE Oceans Global Congress. The work presented was related to his studies on moving masses' impact on the estimation of wave parameters, in the scope of the Kinetic Energy Harvester that is being developed for the WAVY drifters.
Another great outreach achievement is that MELOA is now an official data provider for NextGEOSS Catalogue, a centralised European hub for Earth observation data. The data collected by the WAVY drifters can now be found at NextGEOSS Catalogue, enabling cooperation to maximize the reach and availability of this data among the marine community.
Due to the pandemic, field campaigns could not take place during a large part of the year. Yet, MELOA organized several innovative campaigns in collaboration with different stakeholders from the marine community.
KUKA Robots were used to simulate the effect of waves on drifters, in order to test the WAVY Energy Harvester at the UPC labs.
MELOA also took part in an anti-pollution exercise organized by MyCOAST. The team joined forces with RADAR-ON-RAIA to provide optimized estimates of surface velocity during the activities.
In addition, regular field campaigns took place in Portugal, Spain and Ireland.
Upcoming activities will include new test campaigns with the WAVY drifters in Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. Would you like to participate? Get in touch!
This site uses cookies to enhance your experience. When you continue to browse, you are accepting
You are using an outdated browser. Please, upgrade your browser to improve your experience.
