Assessment Methods for Sea-RelatedHazards in Coastal Areas

Italian legislation provides for hazardcontingency plans to be prepared by the regional,provincial and local authorities. Despite the extentof damage often caused on the Italian coasts by theaction of the sea, sea related hazards have so farbeen usually ignored; only recently a limited budgetin some provinces was allocated for the analysis ofrisks related to storm damage.The present paper reports on the proceduresand the techniques employed and tested within theframework of the provincial contingency plan onthe coast of the Salerno province in Italy (Figure 1).The work was mainly oriented to the evaluation ofthe potential damage that can be caused by the directaction of waves on coastal areas and on thepreparation of hazard maps. The methods and the datathat can be used to evaluate the risks are reviewed here,first by rapid examination of the wave fieldformation offshore and its transformation on shallowwater and then by considering the run-up on beachesand infrastructures; the paper is focussed inparticular on these latter problems, which – formsome point of view – are original and specific tocivil protection problems.     

On the effects of wave drift on the dispersion of floating pollutants

The movement of floating pollutants such as oil slicks on the surface of the sea is due to a number different factors, among which wave drift is certainly significant.In principle, it has been known since Stokes' time that a floating particle is subject to the movement caused by the orbital motion of water particles and that an average drift velocity results because the trajectories are not closed. In the past, however, this effect was often either disregarded or simply included with the surface wind induced current. In recent times the difference between the two effects has been conceptually clarified, so that the average wave drift in random one-dimensional seas has been the object of research and the results are now included in most handbooks and models for oil slick forecasting.Due to the chaotic nature of the wave field, however, the drift also causes floating substances to disperse, and this phenomenon is a much more neglected area of research. Recent work by Bovolin et al. [IAHR Congress, 1997] and Sobey and Barker [J. Coast. Res. 13 (1997)] has brought the subject to attention, and computational tools can now be made to quantify the effect and to verify when and how it should be taken into consideration in oil slick accident practise.The work presented in this paper is based on random simulation of the wave induced Eulerian velocity field in a directional sea, by making use of standard offshore wave directional models and on the ensemble averaging of floating particles trajectories in order to compute the spatial dispersion.     

PAOLO: A Polarimeter Add‐On for the LRS Optics at a Nasmyth focus of the TNG

We describe a new polarimetric facility available at the Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica / Telescopio Nazionale Galileo at La Palma, Canary islands. This facility, PAOLO (Polarimetric Add‐On for the LRS Optics), is located at a Nasmyth focus of an alt‐az telescope and requires a specific modeling in order to remove the time‐ and pointing position‐dependent instrumental polarization. We also describe the opto‐mechanical structure of the instrument and its calibration and present early examples of applications. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)