Monitoring Coastal Waters Close to a Sea Outfall

The design of a water treatment plant and its outfall should respect receptors’ environmental quality standards as well as physicochemical parameters of the discharge itself. Moreover, in order to avoid polluting the outfall, because of the natural processes of dilution and self-depuration, coastal outfall pipes are used to issue the depurated water at a sufficiently long distance from the preserved shoreline. Once recognising that sea currents play a pivotal role on physical and microbiological effects, the following study aims at describing the results of some monitoring surveys carried out in the Italy’s Southern coastal area of Bari. The target area is close to the Eastern wastewater sea outfall system of the city, thus, its analysis is necessary for investigating the process of diffusion and transport of the wastewater outfall and to validate predictive hydrodynamic models. Firstly, monitoring surveys were carried out during the period from summer to autumn 2001 and successively, they were repeated in the following winter 2003 and spring 2003. A Vessel Mounted Acoustic Doppler Profiler was used to measure the components’ speed at different depths. Also, salinity and water temperature data were collected by means of a CTD recorder system while wind intensity and air temperature were recorded with an anemometer and a thermometer respectively, for each station’s measurement.