Abstract
Models for ocean surface wave forecasting in weather centres comprise global and regional systems in order to efficiently meet service demands. Regional models cannot run alone and have to use large area or global models to provide boundary wave spectra. The modern two-way nesting technique is to run the two models together with the regional model domain covered by both resolutions. An alternative method is to use a single multi-resolution grid that fits irregular coastlines and provides refined resolutions in selected regions. This paper presents a multi-resolution model based on a spherical multiple-cell (SMC) grid, which is designed to relax the CFL restriction of Eulerian advection time step at high latitudes by merging the conventional latitude-longitude grid cells. The implementation of the SMC grid in WAVEWATCH III is described, and a multi-resolution (6, 12 and 25 km) global SMC configuration is compared with a suite of nested grid ocean surface wave models, including 35-km global, 8-km European and 4-km UK regional models. Verification against buoy and platform wave observations indicates that the unified model is better than the 35-km global and very close in performance to the two regional models.
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The authors are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor, Dr Oyvind Breivik, for their useful suggestions to improve the manuscript.
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Responsible Editor: Oyvind Breivik
This article is part of the Topical Collection on the 13th International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting in Banff, Alberta, Canada October 27 - November 1, 2013
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Li, JG., Saulter, A. Unified global and regional wave model on a multi-resolution grid. Ocean Dynamics 64, 1657–1670 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-014-0774-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-014-0774-x