Marina di Ravenna Tide Gauge (Italy): rescue of the initial 23 years of data (1873-1896)
Abstract
The tide gauge of Marina di Ravenna, formerly Porto Corsini, Italy, has been first installed in August 1873, but its oldest records, currently available through public archives, only date back to 1896. We found historical documents reporting that the earlier data should have been preserved in the historical archives of the Istituto Geografico Militare (IGM), Florence, Italy. Even if we did not find the original tidal charts in the IGM archives, we were able to retrieve six hand-written volumes reporting the readings of the high and low waters for the period 1873-1922. These volumes and the relevant documents contain important information which allowed clarifying existing doubts on the tide gauge reference levels and constants. The 1873-1922 data were digitized, the quality was assessed as well as the reference to a common datum. With the addition of these initial 23 years of data (1873-1896), the time series of the Marina di Ravenna tide gauge spans now 144 years. The area of Marina di Ravenna was and is affected by subsidence, due to both natural and anthropogenic causes. The effects of human activities started to be noticeable since the 1920s, when the area was interested by reclamation works; during the 60s and 70s, ground-fluid extraction was responsible for subsidence rates up to several cm/year. The newly retrieved records are then particularly valuable for assessing the local sea-level trend in a period when only natural subsidence was affecting the tide-gauge observations.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.G21A0860B
- Keywords:
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- 0726 Ice sheets;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 1223 Ocean/Earth/atmosphere/hydrosphere/cryosphere interactions;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1236 Rheology of the lithosphere and mantle;
- GEODESY AND GRAVITY;
- 1641 Sea level change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE