VALIDATION OF THE WAVE MODEL AGAINST THE COASTAL WAVES UNDER VARIOUS SEA CONDITIONS

Abstract

 Although the many studies reported the quality of wave fields in a coastal area simulated by the third‐generation wave model, there is little information on the difference in the model performance among various sea conditions such as windsea and swell and the multi-modal sea. This study concentrates on the validation of the two wave models, WW3 and SWAN, under each sea condition using coastal wave measurements along the Japan coast. With the data processing of spectral partitioning for the directional wave spectrum, it was confirmed that both the multi-modality on the directional wave spectrum and the fraction of windsea or swell showed the different features in Japan sea coast and Pacific coast, and the features were almost reproducible by either two wave models. By comparing model accuracy under the swell sea conditions on the Pacific coast, it was suggested that the increase in the RMSE of the mean wave period on the Pacific coast was related to the model accuracy under the swell or multi-modal sea conditions.