Study on Application of Mesoscale Meteorological Model for Wave Hindcasting

Abstract

For a prediction of wave field where wave observation data do not exist, numerical wave estimation models such as SWAN are effective. For these models, global meteorological databases provided by ECMWF or NCEP can be used as wind input data; however these data may be coarse for wave hindcasting. In this study, to evaluate the fine wind field data for the wave hindcasting, the mesoscale meteorological model MM5 was applied. By applying the wind fields evaluated by MM5 to SWAN, the wave hindcasting was available with good accuracy. Moreover, for high waves produced by typhoon, it is well known that typhoon bogussing is effective, while wind field calculation at higher resolution without bogussing gave good estimations of wave fields as well.