VECTOR Project / Venice

Forecast, monitoring and historical analysis of high tide phenomena in the Venice Lagoon are focal points for the venetian research community. The VECTOR Project, Line 5, Activity 2 had the aim to statistically study the past extreme events and to provide methods for forecasting and providing future scenarios simulation. One of the objectives of the Project is the climatological reproduction of extreme events in the Venice Lagoon. The historical datasets have been collected and catalogued and numerical models have been applied for future scenarios simulations. The measured data are levels, fluxes at the inlets and wind fields. Seasonality of flooding events has been studied and new trends that justify the actual phenomenology have been provided.

The model SHYFEM implemented in the Adriatic Sea – Venice Lagoon basin permitted to reproduce past and present events and future scenarios based on the evidences from measured dataset.

Both the study of hydrodynamics and morphology permitted to link the Lagoon environment with the open sea, analyzing interaction processes, in terms of circulation and sediment transport. It has been possible to provide information on the inlets hydrodynamics. Morphological changes along the littoral and at the lagoon inlets and bathymetrical variations have been considered to study the flooding events with the modeling tool.