Remote sensing for ship emissions monitoring in Adriatic ports: An approach

The increase of maritime traffic in the Adriatic Sea and consequently the emissions of harmful pollutants, significantly affect air quality, human health and the environment in general. In that sense, the existing measures by IMO and other relevant entities to control emissions from ships are not sufficient. In this paper, the development of onshore LIDAR based systems for measuring ship emissions in Adriatic ports is analyzed. The methodology is based on scanning the exhaust gases from the ship´s exhaust collector with laser beam, and determining the amount of pollutants through the analysis of feedback signals. Although the use of systems based on LIDAR technology is still not legally regulated, they can certainly be used both to create a national registry of ship emissions, and for the detection of ships which burn fuel which is not in accordance with environmental standards.