CALYPSO was a 2-year project partly financed by the EU under the Operational Programme Italia-Malta 2007-2013, and co-ordinated by Prof. Aldo Drago from the Physical Oceanography Unit (now the Oceanography Malta Research Group) of the University of Malta. It brought together 3 other partners from Malta – namely Transport Malta, Civil Protection Department and Armed Forces of Malta – and 4 partners from Sicily – ARPA Sicilia, IAMC-CNR Capo Granitola, Università degli Studi di Palermo (UNIPA) and Università di Catania (CUTGANA). The consortium consisted of research entities and also public entities with responsibilities for civil and environmental protection, surveillance, security and response to hazards.

The main project deliverable was the setting up of a permanent and fully operational HF radar observing system, capable of recording (in real-time with hourly updates) surface currents in the Malta-Sicily Channel. The system consists of HF radar installations on the northern Malta and southern Sicilian shores at selected sites and combines stations to elaborate and publish data to users. Collected data, combined to numerical models, are intended to primarily support applications to optimise intervention in case of oil spill response as well as endow tools for search and rescue, security, safer navigation, improved metro-marine forecasts, monitoring of sea conditions in critical areas such as proximity to ports, and better management of the marine space between Malta and Sicily.

Partners shared experiences and built on existing practices and undertook new joint initiatives targeting key problem issues that put at risk the coastal and marine resources especially from oil pollution at sea. The project further envisaged the participation of public authorities to enable the full exploitation of the system, improve exchange of information and prepare a common base for joint interventions in the case of accidents and emergencies. The project also served for capacity building in the monitoring of the coastal seas and adjoining resources.

The routine acquisition of multi-disciplinary, spatially widespread, long-term data sets of the ocean and coastal seas has triggered an unprecedented leap in the economic value of ocean data and information, and has additionally target multiple applications and users. The project put Malta and Sicily at the forefront of such initiatives in the Mediterranean and has served as a stepping stone to add on to the system in the future to have a coverage of the full marine space around the Maltese Islands and the Sicilian perimeter including the coastal areas.

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