Using SAR and LAM Wind Fields to Investigate the Effects of Land/Atmosphere Interaction

Modern satellite-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images provide datasets at exceptionally high spatial resolutions, appropriate for investigating the mesoscale phenomena in the marine atmospheric boundary layer. Due to the still unsolved problems in the methodologies of wind field retrieval, and the poor temporal coverage at mid-latitudes offered by present SARs, the use of such wind fields is still limited. A fruitful application concerns the combined use of SAR and the hindcasts provided by limited area models, to study the effects of the land/atmosphere interaction. This has been carried out over an area, about 400 km by 400 km wide, around the Crete island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a region subject to complex wind patterns, due to the interaction of the almost steady northerly Etesian wind with the orography of the many islands in the region. The Weather Research \& Forecasting (WRF) atmospheric model has been used to hindcast the wind field at a horizontal resolution of 1 km over the area imaged by an Envisat ASAR image, from which the wind field has been extracted using a methodology based on the two-dimensional continuous wavelet transform. The 10 m wind fields resulting from the numerical simulations, carried out using different diffusion and boundary layer parameterization schemes, have been compared to the SAR-derived one, in order to select the most appropriate scheme, to analyze the correspondence of the observed and the simulated wind structures, and to evaluate the differences in direction and speed. Such a comparison has shown the possible benefits for both the modelling and SAR-wind extraction activities.