The problem of concern in this work is the construction of free divergence fields given scattered horizontal components. As customary, the problem is formulated as a PDE constrained least squares problem. The novelty of our approach is to construct the so-called adjusted field, as the unique solution along an appropriately chosen descent direction. The latter is obtained by the adjoint equation technique. It is shown that the classical adjusted field of Sasaki’s is a particular case. On choosing descent directions, the underlying mass consistent model leads to the solution of an elliptic problem which is solved by means of a radial basis functions method. Finally, some numerical results for wind field adjustment are presented.