Mitigation of ECMWF-scatterometer wind biases in view of storm surge applications in the Adriatic Sea

The paper presents a methodology aimed to mitigate the ECMWF model underestimate of the sea surface wind by a tuning procedure based on the scatterometer-model wind speed and direction biases. The mitigation takes into account the spatial characteristics of the biases and is time dependent. This method globally reduces the model underestimate of the surface wind, handling the different areas of the basin differently, according to the spatial structure of the bias. The methodology is applied and verified over thirty-three test cases. It may be considered a tool to improve the present high water level forecast, waiting for the advent of convincing methodologies for scatterometer wind assimilation into the regional atmospheric models.