Atlantic form Space Workshop, 23-25 January 2019, Southampton, UK.-- 2 pagesThe LAMBDA project is a MERCATOR Ocean funded initiative which aims to improve the COPERNICUS Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) Monitoring and Forecasting Centres (MFCs) thermohaline circulation in coastal areas by a better characterization of the land-marine boundary conditions in the Iberia Biscay Ireland (IBI) region. The project has special regards in the salinity fields andit explores the capacities of watershed numerical modeling and its coupling to mesoscale regional ocean models. Currently hydrological models are not generally coupled to coastal and regional ocean models because, even if regarded as a powerful and useful tool, they do not fully accomplish to estimate accurately the right volume of water reaching the coastal zone for many reasons including water management activities such as human consumption, irrigation, etc. For this reas many coastal and ocean models continue to use river climatologies as boundary conditions for representing such an active boundary. Since continuous salinity observations in the coastal area are scarce, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) maps could provide a robust source of salinity information for validation the current and the enhanced models resulting from this project. In this talk we want to present the preliminary results of the inter-comparison between the SSS dynamics captured by SMOS in the Portuguese Coast and the one described by the MOHID model developed by the Marine Environment and Technology Center (MARETEC) which assimilates an extensive data base of river discharge. The results of this study show that, interannual and seasonal salinity variations are consistent between model and satellite remote sensed salinity. Although this SMOS product does not capture the most coastal pixel salinity dynamics, the time evolution of the main coastal mesoscale structures described by the model are consistent with the ones captured by SMOS. We have compared both salinity data sets with coastal salinity in situ data provided by Instituto Portugues do Mar e da Atmosfera (IPMA) and Insituto Superior Tecnico (IST) of Lisbon. The performances of both salinity data sets (model and satellite) are similar in terms of correlation coefficient with respect to in situ dat
