Improvement in predictability of waves over the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Accurate prediction of ocean surface waves is a challenging task with many associated difficulties. Availability of good quality wind and wave information from satellite platforms inspired the scientific community to assimilate such data in various spectral wave models for enhancing the accuracy of prediction. Over the Indian Ocean, which is the region of interest for the present study, wave heights in extreme situation can go up to 12-14 m, thereby increasing the probability of coastal hazards. This region is further governed by the southern ocean swells that propagate thousands of kilometers. These are, in general, not well captured by the spectral wave models. Therefore, assimilation of altimeter data in open ocean wave model WAM has been attempted with the aim of enhancing the quality of prediction of significant wave height. Further, simulated wave spectra have been assimilated in a coastal wave model SWAN. This assimilation has been found to significantly improve the prediction of the height of wind waves as well as swell waves.

Wave Hindcast Experiments Using Wam Cycle 4.5.3 - Validation with In situ Measurements in the North Indian Ocean

“…(Table 4). The model predicted parameters as shown in Figure 15 reveal good match with the observations as reported by several other researchers such as Raj Kumar et al [13] and Sannasiraj et al [45] in the Indian Ocean. Studies by Raj Kumar et al [13], revealed the model performance to be reasonable during high seastate caused by cyclonic disturbance in the Arabian Sea.…”

“…The model predicted parameters as shown in Figure 15 reveal good match with the observations as reported by several other researchers such as Raj Kumar et al [13] and Sannasiraj et al [45] in the Indian Ocean. Studies by Raj Kumar et al [13], revealed the model performance to be reasonable during high seastate caused by cyclonic disturbance in the Arabian Sea. The difference in hindcast and observed Hs mean for October 2000 and the range of Hs for all the buoy locations considered are well within 0.1 m and 0.4 concluded that, the WAM model derived wave parameters such as Hs and Tc compared well with the observed wave parameters in most cases for January 2000.…”

“…There has been considerable advancement in the field of wave modelling and prediction all over the world [7][8][9][10][11][12]. In the past a number of studies are carried in the North Indian Ocean using deep water wave models WAM and WAVEWATCH III [13][14][15][16]. In India, with the launch of OCEANSAT-I (IRS-P4) in 1999, extensive validations were performed with the third generation wave model WAM C4 for the Indian Ocean region using the analysed wind fields provided by NCMRWF [17].…”

Influence of winds on temporally varying short and long period gravity waves in the near shore regions of the eastern Arabian Sea

“…A general wave condition in the Arabian Sea during premonsoon and SW monsoon periods also depend on the swells and wind sea identified from the far northwest Arabian Sea because of the northwesterly Shamal winds (Aboobacker et al, 2011a;Glejin et al, 2013). Many authors reported the presence of SW swells (Kumar et al, 2000(Kumar et al, , 2009Kurian et al, 2009) off the west coast of India, but their generating area remain unknown. Hamilton (1992) studied the measured long period waves and low amplitude swells observed from wave buoys deployed in the western North Atlantic Ocean.…”

A coupled hydrodynamic modeling system for PHAILIN cyclone in the Bay of Bengal

“…The nested boundary condition of time varying two-dimensional wave energy spectra from a coarse resolution (0.25°× 0.25°) SWAN run for the larger Indian Ocean domain is prescribed along the open ocean boundary of the study area. Earlier studies by Raj Kumar et al (2009) and Bhowmick et al (2011) report on the application of SWAN wave model for the Indian Ocean. These studies confine to wave prediction using SWAN in standalone mode.…”