A Model-based Regional Wave Climatology

At the Naval Oceanographic Office, the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) has been used for the past decade to predict waves for operational purposes. We have recently received interest in high resolution monthly climatological summaries of significant wave height. In a number of these cases, the models have run for more than five years and can therefore be expected to be a reasonable approximation to a model-based climatology. A summary of these results will be presented for select locations in a variety of regions and comparisons with a climatology based on National Center for Atmospheric Research 30-year reanalysis using the global wave model Wavewatch III (WW3).