Toward Marine Environmental Predictions in the Mediterranean Sea Coastal Areas: A Monitoring Approach

Marine environmental predictions involve the observation and modeling of physical, biogeochemical processes and parameters, fused by advanced data assimilation schemes that optimally merge the observational and numerical modeling information in order to produce forecasts. The result of such system should be interfaced with socio-economic models of sustainable development and management of marine resources. Fusing the deterministic dynamical information about the marine ecosystem with the socio-economic and political knowledge of the marine environment has not been tried yet but it is one of the outstanding challenges in integrated coastal management studies. This paper tries to show a scientific strategy to predict the physical and biochemical components toward marine environmental predictions, being aware that some considerations could be changed in view of the integration with socio-economic models and issues. Here we use prediction in total analogy with forecasting and thus as synonymous of deterministic prognosis of dynamical variables from a pre-defined initial state of the system.