Climed bringing together the Mediterranean's future engineers

MEDITERRANEAN because, over the next few years, the Mediterranean will begin to see its environment severely disrupted by the effects of climate change. This fate has spurred the RMEI to bring together engineers, agronomists, managers and architects from the Mediterranean Rim and initiate Climed, a project launched in 2014 and involving 13 schools in France, Tunisia and Morocco.

Climed aims to instil a collective awareness among young students of the environmental issues facing the Mediterranean and their impact on the industrial, agronomic and urban development choices of tomorrow. "It seems vital to us to ensure future professionals get into the habit of communicating and exchanging views to design strategies that are the result of a collaborative thought process," underlines Olivier Boiron, director of the RMEI. 

"In the beginning, we saw the building of the weather station as a bit of a challenge," admits Abbes Manel, in her third year of mechatronics at Sousse. "But we quickly understood the usefulness of the project and the network for bringing climatic issues to people's attention," adds the Tunisian student. "We were able to discuss sustainable development issues with Tunisian students, issues that concern us all but differently depending on the country," says Aurore Duhamel, engineering student at the École Centrale de Marseille.

The partnering schools are working within Climed to set up a network of connected weather stations that record and make public standard data such as wind speed and direction, air pressure, temperature and rainfall, but also pollution-related data. The stations will soon be connected to the cloud-based server to enable the data to be sent to all RMEI network members.

"We are making the engineering students work together on solutions that will increase awareness of environmental and climatic issues among the populations," explains Zoubeir Tourki, director of the Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Sousse (ENISO), one of the RMEI network members.

In Tunisia, a dozen or so engineers with different specializations (mechatronics, IT, industrial electronics) are involved in designing, programming and manufacturing modules made of composite materials. Each country team is building its weather station to the same specifications. The RMEI is due to deliver the server that will allow the data to be stored.
 

Over the coming months, the engineering students will draw up a joint protocol for measuring the data in the Mediterranean. They are also due to set up a website and an Android app for retrieving the data in real time.