Medicane characteristics from high-resolution satellite radar observations
- Project by: Science Hub Team
- November 26, 2025
Arthur Avenas, Dr, Internal Research Fellow @ ESRIN Science Hub
This research project focuses on the characterization of “Medicanes” (or Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones), intense weather systems that pose significant risks to coastal regions. A major challenge in understanding these cyclones has been the scarcity of in-situ measurements, which hinders accurate estimations of their intensity and surface wind structure. Benefiting from a reasonable spatio-temporal sampling over the Mediterranean Sea, observations from polar-orbiting satellites can document the medicane surface wind field but usually operate at a medium spatial resolution. To bridge this gap, this study utilizes high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations to analyze the fine-scale morphology of the sea surface wind fields associated with these events.
The methodology relies on data acquired by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission. A database of 19 acquisitions of well-established and possible medicanes occurring between 2014 and 2023 was analyzed. High-resolution ocean surface wind speeds can be retrieved from the satellite imagery, allowing for a detailed examination of the medicane eye and surrounding wind field. This approach provided a unique opportunity to quantify critical parameters that are often difficult to resolve with standard scatterometers or numerical models.
The analysis reveals that while medicanes exhibit smaller outer sizes and lower Rossby numbers compared to tropical cyclones of similar intensities, their inner size (or radius of maximum wind) are of comparable magnitude, indicating a compact wind structure. Furthermore, the SAR imagery successfully resolves fine-scale features, including convective cells, heavy rainfall signatures, and boundary layer roll vortices, which imply strong similarities in turbulent fluxes with tropical systems. The processed high-resolution SAR wind field datasets generated in this study are available to the research community upon request.
