Waves

This is not really a direct product from SONEL data, but the French tide gauges and their associated data distributed by SONEL helped validating the model, and SONEL supports the distribution of its results.

Two wave numerical hindcast were realized for the North Atlantic Ocean based on the code WaveWatchIII (hereafter WWIII, Tolman, 2009).

The former employs a 1°*1° spatial resolution and is forced by wind fields originating from the 20CR reanalysis (Compo et al., 2011) over the period 1900-2008; more details can be found in Bertin et al. (2013).

The latter was forced by wind fields originating from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (Kalnay et al., 1996) for the period 1948-2012 and uses a 0.5°*0.5° spatial resolution. The physical parameterization for wind input and dissipation correspond to "Test 405" as described in Ardhuin et al. (2010) and more details on this hindcast can be found in Dodet et al. (2010).

Time series of significant wave height (Hs), and peak period (Fp) and mean wave direction (Dir) - for NCEP only - at all wet grid nodes can be retrieved, directly from this window or through a FTP server.

All files of numerical hindcast wave modeling are available for download from the map page. The global zone is 079W-01N->009E-79N. For NCEP/NCAR reanalysis, the points on the map displayed with a 1.0°*1.0° resolution, but the download includes the intergrated 0.5° points. Thus, the number of points considered may grow very quickly.

References

Bertin, X., E. Prouteau, and C. Letetrel, 2013. A significant increase in wave height in the North Atlantic Ocean over the 20th century. Global and Planetary Change 106, 77-83.

Dodet, G., Bertin, X., and Taborda, R., 2010. Wave climate variability in the North-East Atlantic Ocean over the last six decades. Ocean Modelling 31, 120-131.

Ardhuin, F., et al., 2010. Semiempirical dissipation source functions for ocean waves. part 1: Definition, calibration, and validation. Journal of Physical Oceanography 40 (9), 1917-1941, doi:10.1175/2010JPO4324.1.

Compo, G. P., J. S. Whitaker, P. D. Sardeshmukh, N. Matsui, R. J. Allan, et al. 2011. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis project. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 137, 1-28.

Kalnay, E., Kanamitsu, M., Cistler, R., Collins, W., Deaven, D., Gandin, L., Iredell, M., Saha, S., White, G.,Woolen, J., Zhu, Y., Chelliah, M., Ebisuzaki, W., Higgins, W., Janowiak, J., Mo, K., Ropelewski, C., Wang, J., Leetma, A., Reynolds, R., Jenne, R., Joseph, D., 1996. The NCEP/ NCAR reanalysis project. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 77, 437-471.

Tolman, H. L., 2009. User manual and system documentation of WAVEWATCH III version 3.14. NOAA/NWS/NCEP/MMAB Technical Note 276, 194 p.