Objective
This proposal is intended to undertake comprehensive intercomparison and verifications of the visually observed, numerically simulated and remotely sensed wave and wind data and to evaluate global- scale climatological wind and wave fields on the basis of the cross-calibrated data from independent sources. An outstanding feature of the proposed work is the intercomparison for the period of 1980s and 1990s which provides an overlap of all three data sets with instrumental measurements, and will help to establish the link between historical routine wave observations and satellite measurements and model simulations which will provide global scale wave information in the 21st century. Visual wind and wave data available from the COADS collection of individual marine reports will be evaluated by the Russian research team.
Southampton Oceanography Centre will provide the remotely sensed data set assembled from four research satellites - GEOSAT, TOPEX/Poseidon and ERS1/2. The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute will provide the wave hindcast data from the WAM model, forced by European Center Reanalysis Project winds. Intercomparison of these three products to each other and to instrumental measurements, which will be provided primarily by the Russian and the UK research teams, will contribute to the improvement of every product and will provide the opportunity to study the reliability of the reported dramatic increase in the storminess of the North Atlantic mid-latitudes in 1980s and 1990s and the relationships between the changing waves and winds and the atmospheric circulation patterns. Ocean surface forcing fields, such as wind stress will be obtained from the WAM model runs and the voluntary observing ships climatology and will contribute to the improvement of the modelling of the ocean and atmosphere circulation.
Results of this project will contain the development of new climatological data sets, methods of the validation and verification of the global wave and wind data, and climatological assessments. Wind and wave data products and forcing fields obtained under this project will be valuable to users and modellers of air-sea flux data. The climatological data will be available as an atlas, which can be accessed through the project WWW site
Topic(s)
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SO14 3ZH Southampton
United Kingdom