Development of a wave-current model through coupling of FVCOM and SWAN

Abstract A coupled wave-current system has been developed in the present paper based on two open source community models, the Finite-Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM) and the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) using Model Coupling Toolkit (MCT). The coupled system runs on unstructured grids and multiple processors, and information, including water elevations and currents from FVCOM and wave parameters from SWAN, exchanges between FVCOM and SWAN in both on-line and two-way manners. The system was evaluated against laboratory experiments and the evaluation showed that the simulated results agree well with the measured data. Compared to the existing off-line coupling system based on FVCOM and SWAN, the system in the present study is able to accomplish the on-line, two-way coupling, and at the same time, is more efficient for computations and easier to use for the nearshore wave-current simulations.