ANOMALOUS SCATTEROMETER WINDS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA DUE TO THE PRESENCE OF SHIPS

Permanent signatures of high winds have been noticed on the scatterometer mean wind fields over the Mediterranean Sea, with difficulty ascribable to geophysical phenomena. These signatures are located along straight lines and close to coasts. The scatterometer wind data producing these signatures should be detected and removed, because they may contaminate the results derived from them. For this, different methods of outliers detection have been tested, evidencing the presence of wind speed outliers mainly close to coasts and along the known ship routes. Therefore it seems probable that these signatures are due to the presence of ships on the scatterometer footprint.