Here we present four global wind wave hindcasts based on spectral wave model WAVEWATCH III version 5.16 forced with CFSR, ERA5, MERRA2, ERA-INTERIM atmospheric reanalyses for 1980-2019. Four hindcasts are made freely available to the users at 6-hourly time resolution.
Reliable information about ocean surface waves is important for ocean engineering and marine operations as well as for scientific purposes since waves impact a lot of processes important for climate system.
Hindcast based on newly released ECMWF reanalysis ERA5 demonstrated the best agreement with both satellite altimetery (with normalized bias being up to 5%, and RMSE up to 0.5 m) and buoy measurements, including values of upper percentiles.
Grigorieva, V.G., Gulev, S.K. & Sharmar, V.D. (2020). Validating Ocean Wind Wave Global Hindcast with Visual Observations from VOS. Oceanology 60, 9–19 doi.org/10.1134/S0001437020010130.
V Sharmar, M Markina. (2020). Validation of global wind wave hindcasts using ERA5, MERRA2, ERA-Interim and CFSRv2 reanalyzes IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 606 012056 doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/606/1/012056.
Design and development: Vitali Sharmar, Alexander Gavrikov and Andrey Muratov Wave-Hindcast. All Rights Reserved