INTRODUCTION

Cruise ADR02_08, coordinated by ISAC-CNR, is dedicated to the ADRICOSM-STAR project (coordinating Institution CMCC, scientific Coordinator Prof. Nadia Pinardi) and this year's MEDPOL project phase. ADRICOSM-STAR "... aims at the development and partial implementation of an integrated coastal area and river and urban waters management system that considers both observational and modelling components." The research area is the Montenegro and Albanian coastal and marginal zone, inclusive of Kotor Bay (Boka Kotorska). The project involves 19 public and private partners from Italy, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania and has a duration of 3 years starting from March 2007.

MEDPOL objectives are (citing the MEDPOL website):

• to present periodical assessments of the state of the environment in hot spots and coastal areas (needed to provide information for decision makers on the basic environmental status of the areas which are under anthropogenic pressures);
• to determine temporal trends of some selected contaminants in order to assess the effectiveness of actions and policy measures, and
• to enhance the control of pollution by means of compliance to national/international regulatory limits.

Participating countries are: Albania, Algeria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Morocco, Slovenia, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey.

The cruise objectives is:

• To acquire classic hydrological data of the area
• To acquire geochemical data of the water column in the area
• To acquire marine biological data of the area
• To acquire hyperspectral radiation profile data of the area
• To initiate the systematic mapping of the study zone sea bottom and sub-bottom with Multibeam and CHIRP technology
• To collect sediment data in selected stations for pollutant analysis
• To recover, service and redeploy an instrumented mooring in the center of the South Adriatic Sea.

The cruise hydrological data will be used to generally characterize water masses and to map the extension of coastal waters into the open sea and to assess their mixing. Also, the data will be used in the ADRICOSM-STAR data assimilation effort in circulation modelling.

The cruise hydrological, geochemical (colored dissolved organic matter, total suspended matter, hereafter CDOM and TSM, respectively), biological (chlorophyll) and hyperspectral radiation data will be analysed to implement a regional algorithm for the estimation of chlorophyll via remote sensing ocean color imagery of the coastal zone (Case II waters, CDOM and generally TSM rich which modulate remotely sensed reflectances in the visible bands, thus masking the chlorophyll radiometric signal).

Multibeam and CHIRP data will be used to assess the geological and surficial and subsurficial morphological setting, other than help to update bathymetric maps. Among the settings we may cite sediment transport pathways, such as accumulation and erosion areas, and risk and hazard studies. In addition, high resolution bathymetric data will be used to construct digital terrain models useful for regional modelling of wave and current dynamics. As a result of this investigation the owners of the data will also be able to produce environmental and geological maps at variuos scales. In particular, Kotor Bay data, along with pollution data from sediment samples, will be used to optimize the wastewater disposal effort in environmentally safe conditions.

The data relative to the mooring chain will extend the existing hydrological and current multiyear dataset dedicated to the understanding of the Adriatic Sea circulation dynamics, particularly in relation to the interannual variability of winter convection events.

This paper reports the shipboard activities during the cruise, including description of the ship, equipment and their usage, along with details of the general settings, performances and some scientific and technical results.