A real-time coastal sea surface wind forecasting system is developed and the system is automatically operated once a day for the eastern part of the Seto Inland Seas. The core part of the forecasting system is the mesoscale meteorological model MM5, which calculates 1.5km-resolution sea surface wind fields up to 2 days ahead. The performance is verified using in-situ wind measurements from a marine tower of Shirahama Oceanography Observatory. As a result, this system is found to have root mean square errors of less than 2.5m/s (just after initial time) to about 3m/s (48h ahead). These values correspond to 35 to 50% of the mean wind speed. If the error gets smaller with further improvements of the system in the future, this forecasting system will be able to play a large part in local weather routing.
