Storm directional wave spectra measured with a single buoy

The Endeco 956 Wavetrack Buoy was one of many wave sensors involved in the ARSLOE experiment in the Fall of 1980. Since that time, a new signal processing approach has been developed to produce directional wave spectra for comparison with all other sensors used in the experiment. The authors are under contract to NOAA Coastal Waves Program group and have been concerned with minimizing the limitations of a single buoy method for obtaining directional spectral results. The previous results of the development have been briefly reported in the Oceans \´81 meeting in Boston, the Berkeley meeting, the Paris meeting, as well as in workshops called for all participants of the ARSLOE experiment. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss certain refinements to the method of analysis that improved directional resolution, and improved the ease of interpretation of processed wave data. One example of this improvement resulted from the application of a special "window or weighting function" which eliminated an analysis related artifact which appeared as a backward-traveling wave component. The paper presents the directional spectra for different time intervals through the growth and decay of a storm. These are in the form of contours of constant wave power on a direction (magnetic) vs frequency cartesian plane.