Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) is the Engineering School of the Technical University of Lisbon, which is committed to education and research in various areas of engineering and technology. It has an academic staff of approximately 800, about 8000 undergraduate students, 750 MSc. students and 250 PhD students.

The Unit of Marine Technology and Engineering is a Research Unit of Instituto Superior Técnico, organised in five groups: Marine Environment, Dynamics of Marine Vehicles and Structures, Marine Structures, Computer Aided Ship Design and Safety, Reliability and Maintainability. This Unit was involved in about 20 European projects having been the co-ordinator of 2 of them.

The Marine Environment Group works with different models of waves, including the deterministic models of wave generation and propagation and the probabilistic ones describing the variability of wave parameters in different time scales. Wave measurements, hindcast and remotely sensed data are used for the studies. The topic of the fate of oil spills is also studied in this group. The group has extensive experience on the application of probabilistic models to the wave environment. They have been involved in studying both the short term and the long term variability of wave parameters. They have also been involved in wave hindcasting using the WAM model, and in data assimilation studies. They also collaborated in some studies using remote sensed data.

The technique has been developed and applied to the NCEP-reanalysis for the period 1957-96 in a national project for an area covering most of Northern Europe and adjacent seas. The data are provided on a 50x50km grid and will be used in the project to force the wave and ocean models at the upper boundary.

A repetition of such a "regional reanalysis" will be executed within the project for three areas, namely, the Irish Sea, the Northeast Atlantic south of the UK and including the Azores and Canary Islands and the Mediterranean Sea. This effort aims at the use of already proven techniques to exploit the available atmospheric data and obtain the necessary forcing for ocean circulation and wave models.