The POSEIDON Supersite Observatory. A Technological Test-bed for the Eastern Mediterranean

The POSEIDON system is a comprehensive marine monitoring and forecasting system that progressively fills the gaps of observing facilities in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. This system is expanding its various open and coastal sea infrastructure that includes fixed platforms, a cabled deep-ocean observatory, a FerryBox system, high-frequency (HF) radars, gliders, a calibration lab and Argos floats. Besides offering information to science and society, the POSEIDON system via its various platforms is also being used as a technology test-bed for numerous applications. The fields of technological test span from industrial application as material aging, advanced positioning systems, fuel cells technology, new sensor testing, to multiple scientific uses as carbonate system and fluorescence sensors, microplastics and pollutants sampling. These applications are summarized and selected examples are presented. The demand for access to POSEIDON infrastructures for technological tests has increased over the last years thanks to the transnational access activities coordinated by EU projects and is expected to further increase via a national research marine observing infrastructure initiated in 2018. The addition of new infrastructures planned for the near future will further enhance the technological test-bed possibilities and thus the interaction with other research institutions and the industry.