Apartments on the ground floor in Venice?





Check the mean sea level for your property



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Tide Level Of Apartments - Venice Italy

The apartments on the ground floor in Venice have a key to be checked: the mean sea level of the street level ("calle"). These properties are numerous in Venice and often subject to flooding because they have no protection system except the safety related to the mean sea level of the unit itself. Let's try to understand this problem with simple exemples that easily make the point.



MUNICIPALITY OF VENICE : between 101 and 110
The ground floor of this property without any work of protection from high water, has a street level in this case not very generous. So, with a good chance, in case of high tide of normal type the ground floor would be flooded.

HYPOTHETICAL APARTMENT IN VENICE: between 150 and 160
In this case the property, although on the ground floor, has a good point on the mean sea level, and therefore also in case of a very high water the apartment would not be flooded.




Tide forecast in real time



Tide Level Forecast - Venice Italy

The tide


Conventionally it's called "high water", a tide that exceeds, in Venice, the value of 80 cm above the mareographic zero of Punta Salute : at this level there are problems of transport and pedestrian traffic at the lowest points of the city (St. Mark Square). When the tide exceeds 100 cm, the phenomenon begins to affect larger sections of the city.

The tide observed in Venice can be thought as the sum of two components: the astronomical tide, related to the motion of celestial bodies, mainly the Moon and the Sun, and the meteorological cotribution due to the state of the atmosphere. The increased frequency of high water in Venice during the past decades, is due to phenomena like eustacy (rising of sea level) and subsidence (lowering of the ground by natural or anthropic causes).



In Venice there is a considerable number of apartments, offices and stores on the ground floor that are daily offered for sale or rent, well known are the problems that these properties have with exceptionally high tide phenomena; however let’s try to analyze the fact that not all these properties in Venice are sources of problems or anyway considered unhealthy apartments as each building has its own mean sea level and it is essential to understand the concept of MEAN SEA LEVEL that is determinant to plunge into this issue.

Tide Level Exemple - Venice Italy





DEFINITION:

The sea level is the height of the sea surface less of variations due to tides. The sea level varies continuously, both in the short term, because of the waves and the wind, and in the medium term, because of the variation of the atmospheric pressure due to the passage of weather systems, and astronomical phenomena such as gravitational attraction, that the Sun and the Moon exert on the oceans.

Because of these continuous variations it is preferred to speak of mean sea level, obteined by calculating the average of the sea level measurements for a period of time sufficiently long. By convention, the height above sea of a city is measured from the municipal building.

In Venice, however, due to the chronic problem this data has been calculated not only from the municipal building, but on the whole city meter per meter, giving an overall mapping about the average sea levels (The data are public and can be consulted online from INSULA site).