MEDUSA

On September 28th, 2021 the Junta de Andalucía published the resolution of the Operational Program FEDER Andalucía 2014-2020, in which the R&D project "Establishment of a prediction system for solid waste pollution in the Andalusian coasts" called Medusa, with a duration of 2 years, was presented and awarded to us.

The project has two main objectives covering two aspects: scientific and technological. On the one hand, it proposes the implementation of a system for predicting the dispersion patterns of solid waste, in this case sanitary towels, by means of a numerical model that can predict the circulation of the area under study, based on boundary conditions from the oceanic-meteorological forecasts of Puertos del Estado and the Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (State Meteorological Agency). Regarding the technological aspect, the aim is to design and build a submarine geolocation system and an intelligent solid waste model to be able to measure in situ the real trajectories of these wastes. This system would not only function as a validation tool for the numerical model, but would also represent a methodology scalable to other underwater objects or vehicles, with wide use in the field of observational oceanography.

The project has Francisco Criado Aldeanueva and Pablo Otero Roth as Principal Investigators. Alfonso Ariza Quintana, M. Carmen Clemente Medina, Miguel-Ángel Luque-Nieto, Alberto Poncela González and Simone Sammartino as members of the research team. Irene Nadal Arizo and Álvaro Hernández Romero also participate in the project.