Analysis of an intense bora event in the Adriatic area

Numerical simulations of a bora event, recently occurred in the Adriatic area, are presented. Two reference runs at different horizontal resolution (about 20 km and 8 km) describe the case. Initial conditions for the atmospheric model integration are obtained from ECMWF analyses. Satellite data are used for comparisons. A further run at horizontal resolution of 8 km, using initial satellite sea surface temperatures, is performed to evaluate their impact on the low level wind over the Adriatic Sea. All the simulations are carried out with 50 layers in the vertical. Numerous aspects of the simulations are found to be in agreement with the understanding as well as the observational knowledge of bora distinctive characteristics. Satellite data and model results indicate that a more realistic simulation of the bora wind over the sea is achieved using the model with 8 km horizontal resolution and that the low level wind in this case is sensitive, though weakly, to the difference between the used sea surface temperature fields. Simulation results also show that both wind intensity and the area around wind peaks tend to increase when relatively higher sea surface temperatures are used.