THE ITALIAN FIXED-POINT OBSERVATORY NETWORK FOR MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING - IFON. State of the art and upgrades during the Italian flagship project RITMARE (2012 - 2016)

The Italian Fixed-point Observatory Network (IFON) integrates well-established ocean infrastructures managed by various national research institutions (CNR, OGS, and ENEA). The implementation of this network was one of the aim of the SP5-WP3 of the Flagship Project RITMARE. In the first four years of the project, the state of art of the 15 operative sites has been completed and 2 more stations are operative from 2015-2016. For each site, the technical characteristics and methods of transmission have been described, and for some sites, several upgrades were accomplished in order to develop, integrate, and consolidate the network. Periodically, oceanographic cruises for the maintenance and implementation of the sites were carried out. After the definition of the minimum requirements, the criteria for the validation of physical and biogeochemical data were determined. They include a selection of existing rules, procedures and recommendations on automatic data Quality Control (QC), and their validation in Near Real Time (NRT). These procedures are intended to unify the validation criteria of the parameters collected daily from the network and to provide the scientific community with a homogeneous and comparable set of data of the Italian seas. Within the WP3, a relocatable observing system for emergencies at sea was implemented. Some new instruments were bought and some others were upgraded. In addition, the IFON was enriched with an air-sea observatory in Lampedusa Island with a new buoy deployed during summer 2015