Publications

Ponce de Leon, S. and Guedes Soares, C. (2008), “Sensitivity of a Wave Model Predictions to Wind Fields in the Western Mediterranean Sea”, Coastal Engineering, Vol. 55, Issue 11, pp. 920-929

The paper compares the wave hindcast in the Western Mediterranean sea using the reanalysis wind fields from HIPOCAS and ERA-40 from ECMWF for November 2001. The study has concentrated on the Mediterranean coast of Spain where there are known difficulties with the wind and wave modelling. Two winter storms have been compared. The main differences between the significant wave heights using the ERA-40 reanalysis (ECMWF) and HIPOCAS reanalysis winds were observed to increase when moving southwards in the geographical domain at the offshore locations. The systematic negative biases of Hs were obtained with the ERA-40 data at all the coastal locations analyzed, whereas the positive biases are typical for the HIPOCAS reanalysis. For offshore and coastal locations when using the ERA-40 data the Hs biases increased moving to South, this pattern was not so clear at all for the HIPOCAS data, but was observed the same tendency as well. The inconsistencies in the comparisons of modelled waves against measurements seem to be associated with the quality of the wind fields.

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