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The effects of the accuracy of the atmospheric forcings on the prediction of the sea surface transport in coastal areas.
Abstract
In the framework of the Italian flagship project RITMARE (http://www.ritmare.it/en/) an Operational Oceanography
Systems (OOS hereafter) based on high resolution 3D hydrodynamic model has been developed for the
Oristano Gulf (Sardinia, Italy), with the aim of making short term predictions of water currents and pollutant transport.
Atmospheric data provided by the SKIRON meteorological model system (http://forecast.uoa.gr/) were used
to make the predictions.
In order to asses the quality of the wind field adopted to force the hydrodynamic model, a coastal wind measuring
system (WMS hereafter) was developed. The WMS is composed by five three-components anemometers located
along the Gulf coasts, which provide hourly and operationally wind measurements. These data are then used operationally
to derive high resolution wind fields over the entire Gulf and surrounding coastal areas. The modelled
wind data have been compared with the measured ones and the meteorological model accuracy estimated. A set of
lagrangian buoys were deployed within the Gulf to measure the sea surface transport due to the main local wind
regimes. The OOS were used to reproduce the paths followed by each lagrangian buoy using as forcing conditions
both the wind fields measured by the local WMS and the predicted ones. Therefore the effects of the atmospheric
forcing quality on predicting the surface hydrodynamics at coastal scale were determined.
This paper is aimed to outline the possible uses of SAR derived wind fields in coastal meteorology, taking advantage of two running projects: the first of meteorological flavor, aimed to measure and reproduce the surface wind field in a small coastal area; the second to investigate the possibilities offered by the combined use of simultaneous COSMO-SkyMed and RADARSAT-2 SAR images in the description of the wind field in the same area. The main issues faced in this study and partially solved are: the development of a suitable method-
ology to extract the wind field from SAR images at different bands, polarization, incidence angle; the understanding of the potentialities of the SAR derived winds to catch the patterns of the spatial variability of the wind over the coastal area; the assessment of the SAR derived wind from comparisons with the simultaneous experimental data. Of course, the results presented here are not exhaustive, but only aim to track
the ongoing research on the topic of wind over local coastal areas.
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