Jesus, S. M.Soares, C.Martins, N.2014-10-032014-10-032004S.M. JESUS, C. SOARES and N. MARTINS, "Acoustic Rapid Environmental Assessment: the AOB concept" in Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment Workshop, NURC, La Spezia, Italy.AUT: SJE00662;http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/5179Rapidly assessing the environmental conditions of a given coastal area with the capability of being able to predict its evolution in the next 24 or 48 hours has been the goal of many initiatives since the end of the cold war and the shift of strategic regions to shallow areas. Most efforts were carried out by oceanographic teams feeding data of various nature (currents, SST, temperature, altimetry, wave height, etc...) into small scale circulation models (such as mini HOPS and NCOM). Testing has been going on for several years on the validation of such models in various scenarios. Among others, the goal of this testing is to decrease the error variance of various environmental parameter predictions at 1, 2 or 3 days with a minimal model initialization.englecture