Global-scale wave climate models, such as Wavewatch III, are widely used in oceanography to hindcast the sea state that occurred in a particular geographic area at a particular time. These models are applied in rogue-wave science for characterizing the sea states associated with observations of rogue waves (e.g., the well know ?Draupner? [1] or ?Andrea? [2] waves) or ship accidents attributed to their presence (e.g., the Suwa-Maru [3] or the Louis Majesty accidents [4]).

While wave climate models are generally successful in providing realistic representations of the sea state and are able to handle a large number of physical factors, they are also based on a very coarse-grained representation of the wave field and therefore unsuitable for a detailed resolution of the wave field and refined wave-height statistics. On the other hand, local wave models based on first principle fluid dynamics equations are able to represent wave fields in detail, but in general they are hard to interface with the full complexity of real-world sea conditions.

In this talk we will discuss our current efforts in the direction of filling this gap by a combined global- and local-scale approach, and the challenges we face in doing so. We shall discuss some feasible ways of including physical effects such as wave breaking and wind forcing in 3D random sea states simulated by the high order spectral (HOS) method [5], and will show some preliminary results on 3D simulations from hindcasted wave spectra.

References

[1] S. Haver, O.J. Anderson, Freak Waves: Rare Realisations of a Typical Population or Typical Realisations of a Rare Population?, Proceedings of the 10th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference and Exhibition 2000, ISOPE2000, Seattle, May 28-June 2.
[2] A.K. Magnusson M.A. Donelan, The Andrea Wave Characteristics of a Measured North Sea Rogue Wave, Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, 2013, 135, 031108-1.
[3] H. Tamura, T. Waseda, Y. Miyazawa, Freakish sea state and swell-windsea coupling: Numerical study of the Suwa-Maru incident, Geophysical Research Letters, 2009, 36, L01607.
[4] L. Cavaleri, L. Bertotti, L. Torrisi, E. Bitner-Gregersen, M. Serio, and M. Onorato, Rogue waves in crossing seas: The Louis Majesty accident, Journal of Geophysical Research, 2012, 117, C00J10.
[5] B.J. West, K.A. Brueckner, R.S. Janda, D.M. Milder, R.L, Milton, A New Numerical Method for Surface Hydrodynamics, Journal of Geophysical Research, 1987, 92 (C11), 11,803?11,824.