Satellite Derived Winds as Support to the Regional and Coastal Oceanography

This contribution underlines the importance of satellite derived winds for marine applications at regional scales and nearby the coast. The wind is one of the most important forcings of the sea, and its determination by atmospheric models may be unsatisfactory in regional basins and coastal areas, where the orography plays an important role in modifying the air flow, as for example in the Mediterranean Sea. Furthermore, the experimental in-situ determinations of the wind, taken mainly along coast, are often unrepresentative of the wind offshore, and wind reports from open sea platforms and buoys are too few to provide an exhaustive picture of the wind fields. Satellite winds are therefore of paramount importance, offering unique wind data set with spatial resolution fine enough to resolve the large scale and mesoscale features of the wind, included those due to the air-land and the air-sea interactions. The present spatial resolution of scatterometer data is good for regional scale marine applications, but insufficient for coastal meteorology and oceanography. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) wind fields, routinely evaluated by a methodology developed at ISAC, are well suited for coastal applications. In this contribution we show how the scatterometer winds can be used as support to the storm surge forecasts in the Adriatic Sea and to understand and monitor the permanent gyres in the Mediterranean Sea, and how satellite-borne SARs may offer unprecedented description of coastal winds.