Innovative sensors will be developed and/or tested for conducting on-board emissions monitoring. Some sensors are being developed by SCIPPER participants and some are packaged to be used as complete monitoring devices for on-board applications. The market of such systems is currently primitive and the ones existing are known to still have durability and sensitivity issues. The arrival of Tier III and global sulphur regulations will significant grow the need of such systems for monitoring but also for engine and emission control development. SCIPPER innovations in this direction have the potential to fulfil a large market need for such systems.

Innovative techniques will be developed in SCIPPER for remote monitoring, involving optical and spectroscopic detection of pollutants at low concentrations. Such systems have never been used in the past, except in proof-of-concept implementations. These systems will be key for emissions monitoring, research in shipping emission performance but, due to low sensitivity, can also extend for general atmospheric monitoring and not just shipping emissions. These developments add new possibilities for urban atmosphere monitoring systems, offering new techniques to a mature market.

Fully operational environmental sensing UAS will be developed in the project, using latest sensor packages to measure an enhanced range of pollutants, including particulate and UFP concentrations. Further to their obvious potential to measure ship emissions, such UAS can be useful for a variety of environmental implementations, including ambient AQ monitoring, assessment of toxic risk in case of hazardous materials accidents,

New communication protocols between ship and shore for signal transmission involving satellite communications will be materialised. This significantly extends the range in which information can be communicated compared to traditional AIS. This will be used for transmitting environmental information for monitoring purposes in SCIPPER. However, this can be used by ship operators for long distance operation diagnostics and preventive maintenance and potentially creates a very strong industrial market for such systems.

An environmental shipping monitoring centre (ESMC) will be demonstrated, utilising information from the new communication protocols, to demonstrate real-time environmental information from ships in operation. This will be a web-platform or a stand alone application with the potential to visualise ships emissions tracks and create a completely new possibility on how to monitor and control ship emissions for both ship operators and enforcement authorities.

Advanced algorithms with the possibility for single ship (or ship groups) detection from space observation will be developed. This extends the usage of Earth Observation Data and creates strong new potential for on-line platforms to visualise such data, provide real-time environmental information further to tracking, and create several environmental spin-outs of this completely new piece of information. Even if not possible in the end to achieve single ship detection, reliable monitoring of shipping routes can be materialised, allowing much better input to climate science.

Advanced emission factors for estimating in-port ship emissions and advanced emission inventorying tools will be developed for estimating pan-EU and global contributions of ships to air pollution. As shipping regulations are largely global in nature, such global inventorying tools allow estimating the global impact of EU policies, promoting their international outreach.

A first-of-kind ship plume ageing module will be developed and integrated in urban and regional dispersion air quality models. This will significantly improve the capacity of AQ models to simulate atmospheric processes, advancing them to best-of-class at global level. The models will be able to much better predict the impact of ship activity in ports and in maritime routes, providing better solutions for decision making, for urban planning and for port activities optimisation.

New dispersion models based on computational fluid dynamics to simulate in detail how ship plume disperses in the port area and over the neighbouring urban area. In such models, funnel heights and surrounding building heights and geometry can in detail be modelled. This provides a powerful tool to predict the impact of port microenvironment on people’s exposure to pollutants so as to be used at the port design phase with the aim to decrease the environmental impacts of its activities.

Via the SCIPPER guidelines and policy recommendations, planning and enforcement authorities as well as policy makers will have access to innovative tools to deliver much better policy and regulations to address the environmental consequences of shipping. Currently, little is known on how new ship emission limits affect urban AQ, which is deemed to revert with SCIPPER output.

New consultancy services, based on enhanced hardware and software tools, for shipping air pollution measurement and simulation, to provide improved solutions for planning and operational optimisation of shipping-relevant processes in the public and private business sectors.