Seafarers in the Malta-Sicily channel are now a few clicks away from a wealth of information about sea and weather conditions.

Navigators can plan their journeys and have safer trips by downloading a mobile app with interactive maps and instantaneous user-friendly data about the prevailing and predicted sea conditions.

The smartphone app, called Kaptan, Maltese for ‘captain’, has been developed within the Calypso project led by Prof. Aldo Drago from the University of Malta’s Physical Oceanography Research Group.

Calypso is a monitoring and response system against marine oil spills in the Malta channel. It uses an array of HF radars to monitor meteo-marine surface conditions in real time.

The risk of oil spillages beaching on shores and causing irreversible environmental damage is a realistic threat, and the region is situated along the main shipping lanes of the Mediterranean Sea.

Risks could be minimised through surveillance, operational monitoring against pollution threats and a capacity to respond with informed decisions in cases of emergency. The Calypso radar observing system provides the data for this new app. The HF radar CODAR SaaSonde installations are situated on the northern Maltese and southern Sicilian shores at four sites.

The phone app can be downloaded for free for both Android and iOS devices, while the same services are also available online on www.capemalta.net/calypso/kaptan.

A video guide is available at:

http://oceania.research.um.edu.mt/cms/calypsoweb/images/videos/KAPTAN_app.mp4

The project is partially funded by the ERDF Italia – Malta Programme, Cohesion Policy 2007-2013.

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