Assessment Of A New Global Capacity For Wave Climate Synthesis

Reliable knowledge of wave climate is important for most uses of the sea. This paper describes a wave climate synthesis model developed to make the best use of all existing information. It concentrates on validation of the model, which derives data of enhanced reliability from the visual observations reported by ships in service. The enhancement methods are based on parametric modelling of the joint probabilities of wave heights with both wind speeds and wave periods and have been evaluated mainly in application to visual and measured data, but comparisons of model and hindcast data have also been made.