Piedmont: maintenance of the regional meteorological and hydrometric monitoring network

The real-time hydrometeorological monitoring network of the Piedmont Region was installed in the late 1980s by CAE. It is a historic network, among the most extensive in Italy in terms of size, and for the next 5 years, CAE will continue to handle its maintenance service. It is a strategic infrastructure supporting forecasting, monitoring, and alerting functions of the Regional Functional Centre at Arpa Piedmont in Turin.

CAE has deep knowledge of the network architecture and its technological evolution, thanks to over thirty years of experience in the Piedmont area, enabling it to offer a specialized service designed to:

- ensure operational continuity, maximum availability, and high-quality real-time data;
- monitor and prevent hydrogeological, hydraulic, and meteorological risk phenomena;
- support Civil Protection alerting functions.

Maintenance activities are divided into the following categories:

- Preventive maintenance, aimed at preserving the full efficiency of the system as a whole and of its individual components, while ensuring adequate data quality.
- Corrective maintenance, aimed at restoring system functionality following malfunctions or failures.
- Integrative maintenance, covering all timely interventions required following significant events that may compromise any network component. This includes remote maintenance services, 24/7 customized support, and maintenance of the transmission medium

All activities will be systematically reported through the Maintenance Portal.

As part of the maintenance service, an innovative Dynamic Adaptive Routing (RAD) system will be introduced, aimed at automatically optimizing UHF radio paths between peripheral stations and the control center. RAD enhances the reliability and resilience of the regional transmission system through continuous analysis of signal parameters and diagnostic information from nodes, selecting the most efficient connections in real time. Operating transparently with the existing radio infrastructure, the system ensures operational continuity even in the presence of attenuation or failures, evolving the network from a static structure into a dynamic one capable of automatically adapting to environmental and operational conditions.

The Piedmont network represents a complex system consisting of 372 measurement stations distributed across the territory, equipped with UHF transceivers as the primary transmission system, with GPRS and satellite modules as backup. The stations are categorized as follows: 102 hydrometric, 177 pluviometric, 80 meteorological, and 13 nivometric, in addition to 45 repeaters and a main acquisition center with backup in Turin. Thanks to the SIM Project (Sistema Integrato di Monitoraggio e Previsione, in English, Integrated Monitoring and Forecasting System) by the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Energy Security, funded through NRRP resources, the network will be further upgraded and expanded in the Alessandria area.

The service organization considers the morphological characteristics of the Piedmont territory, which includes hard-to-reach sites, 69 of which are accessible only by helicopter and only during certain periods of the year, areas subject to extreme weather conditions, and over 50 high-altitude locations.

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