A high-resolution hindcast of wind and waves for the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea

Abstract

[1] A combined high-resolution atmospheric downscaling and wave hindcast based on the ERA-40 reanalysis covering the Norwegian Sea, the North Sea, and the Barents Sea is presented. The period covered is from September 1957 to August 2002. The dynamic atmospheric downscaling is performed as a series of short prognostic runs initialized from a blend of ERA-40 and the previous prognostic run to preserve the fine-scale surface features from the high-resolution model while maintaining the large-scale synoptic field from ERA-40. The nested WAM wave model hindcast consists of a coarse 50 km model covering the North Atlantic forced with ERA-40 winds and a nested 10-11 km resolution model forced with downscaled winds. A comparison against in situ and satellite observations of wind and sea state reveals significant improvement in mean values and upper percentiles of wind vectors and the significant wave height over ERA-40. Improvement is also found in the mean wave period. ERA-40 is biased low in wind speed and significant wave height, a bias which is not reproduced by the downscaling. The atmospheric downscaling also reproduces polar lows, which cannot be resolved by ERA-40, but the lows are too weak and short-lived as the downscaling is not capable of capturing their full life cycle.

The “shallow-waterness” of the wave climate in European coastal regions

“…As such, this note differs from previous studies that focus on the wave climate, employing either hindcasts (e.g., Gorman et al, 2003;Dodet et al, 2010;Reistad et al, 2011;Aarnes et al, 2012), reanalyses (e.g., Dee et al, 2011;Reguero et al, 2012), or climate projections (e.g., Wang et al, 2004;Hemer et al, 2013) to assess average and/or extreme values of typical wave parameters on regional or global scales. Typical wave conditions can be classified according to the shape of the two-dimensional wave spectrum (e.g., Boukhanovsky et al, 2007), utilizing the fact that the waves will often be a combination of remotely forced swell and locally generated wind waves.…”

The 14th international workshop on wave hindcasting and forecasting and the 5th coastal hazards symposium

“…Bruserud and Haver (2016) compared metocean design criteria for waves and currents based on measured and hindcast data. At the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), the Norwegian Hindcast Archive (NORA10, see Reistad et al 2011;Aarnes et al 2012;Breivik et al 2013;Semedo et al 2015) for wind and waves and the Northern North Sea Current Hindcast Study (NoNoCur) for currents was employed. NORA10 waves and NoNoCur currents were compared to wave and current measurements taken during the period May 2011 to October 2015 at four locations in the northern North Sea.…”

Uncertainties in extreme value modelling of wave data in a climate change perspective

“…For the purpose of this study, a particular set of three datasets generated by running the numerical wave model WAM (Reistad et al 2011) for an area in the North Atlantic with forcings from the climate model GFDL-CM3 (Donner et al 2011) are analysed. One particular location is analysed, disregarding the spatial variability, i.e.…”