Ricerc@Sapienza

This work refers to an interdisciplinary study on the archaeological site of
Pyrgi, an Etruscan harbour still under excavation, located on the Lazio’s coast in Santa
Severa, in the province of Rome. The site in question is subject to frequent flooding which
compromises its accessibility and delays the archaeological excavation operations. The
study is based on the combined use of geomatic technologies, meteorological and climatic
models, and hydrogeological knowledge of the examined site, to have a global view of the

A synthetic aperture radar can offer not only an accurate monitoring of the earth surface deformation, but also information on the troposphere, such as the total path delay or the columnar water vapor at high horizontal resolution. This can be achieved by proper interferometric processing and postprocessing of the radar interferograms. The fine and unprecedented horizontal resolution of the tropospheric products can offer otherwise unattainable information to be assimilated into numerical weather prediction models, which are progressively increasing their resolving capabilities.

The knowledge of water vapour distribution is a key element in atmospheric modeling and considerable information, also at the local scale, can be derived from the GPS-ZTD (global positioning system-Zenith total delay) data.
This paper shows the assimilation of GPS-ZTD data into the RAMS@ISAC (Regional Atmospheric Modeling System at Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of the National Research Council) to improve the representation of the water vapour in the meteorological model.