Local Analysis of Wave Fields Produced From Hindcasted Rogue Wave Sea States

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 known “Draupner” [1] or “Andrea” [2] waves). While spectral 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 (such as the Higher Order Spectral Method) 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. This paper displays our efforts in coupling these two types of models in order to enhance our understanding of past extreme events and provide scope for rogue wave risk evaluation. In particular, high resolution numerical simulations of a wave field similar to the “Andrea” wave one are performed, allowing for accurate analysis of the event.Copyright © 2015 by ASME