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Future wave climate over the west-European shelf seas

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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate changes in the wave climate of the west-European shelf seas under global warming scenarios. In particular, climate change wind fields corresponding to the present (control) time-slice 1961–2000 and the future (scenario) time-slice 2061–2100 are used to drive a wave generation model to produce equivalent control and scenario wave climate. Yearly and seasonal statistics of the scenario wave climates are compared individually to the corresponding control wave climate to identify relative changes of statistical significance between present and future extreme and prevailing wave heights. Using global, regional and linked global–regional wind forcing over a set of nested computational domains, this paper further demonstrates the sensitivity of the results to the resolution and coverage of the forcing. It suggests that the use of combined forcing from linked global and regional climate models of typical resolution and coverage is a good option for the investigation of relative wave changes in the region of interest of this study. Coarse resolution global forcing alone leads to very similar results over regions that are highly exposed to the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast, fine resolution regional forcing alone is shown to be insufficient for exploring wave climate changes over the western European waters because of its limited coverage. Results obtained with the combined global–regional wind forcing showed some consistency between scenarios. In general, it was shown that mean and extreme wave heights will increase in the future only in winter and only in the southwest of UK and west of France, north of about 44–45° N. Otherwise, wave heights are projected to decrease, especially in summer. Nevertheless, this decrease is dominated by local wind waves whilst swell is found to increase. Only in spring do both swell and local wind waves decrease in average height.

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Abbreviations

AGCM:

Atmospheric Global Climate Model

AR4:

Assessment Report 4

CERA:

Climate and Environmental Retrieval and Archive

CLM:

Climate Local Model

ECHAM5:

5th Generation of Global Climate Model developed by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

ETOP01:

1 arc-minute global relief model of Earth’s surface that integrates land topography and ocean bathymetry

GCM:

Global Climate Model

GEV:

Generalized Extreme Value

IPCC:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

MPI-M:

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

NCEP:

National Centers for Environmental Prediction

NGDC:

National Geophysical Data Center

NOAA:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

RCM:

Regional Climate Model

RLP:

Return Level Plot

SLP:

Sea Level Pressure

SRES:

Special Report on Emissions Scenarios

STOWASUS-2100:

Research Project: regional STOrm WAve and SUrge Scenarios for the 2100 century

SWRDA:

South West Regional Development Agency UK

UKCIP:

UK Climate Impacts Programme

WAM:

WAve Model

WAMDI:

Work Group for WAM model

WASA:

Research Project: Waves and Storms in the North Atlantic

WDCC:

World Data Center for Climate

WMO:

World Meteorological Organization

WW3:

Wave Watch III model

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Acknowledgements

The climate change experiments used in this work are supplied from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and are retrieved from the WDCC/CERA database (WDCC 2009). The authors acknowledge the support of UK South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) through grant no. SWR01011. We would also like to thank Dr. Julian Stander (School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Plymouth) for his valuable advice on the statistical analysis of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIMA - Centre for Marine and Environmental Research, University of the Algarve, Hidrotec-ISE, Campus da Penha, Faro, 8005-139, Portugal

    Anna Zacharioudaki

  2. Coastal Engineering Research Group, School of Marine Science and Engineering, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, UK

    Shunqi Pan, Dave Simmonds, Vanesa Magar & Dominic E. Reeve

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  1. Anna Zacharioudaki
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  2. Shunqi Pan
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  3. Dave Simmonds
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  4. Vanesa Magar
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  5. Dominic E. Reeve
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Correspondence to Anna Zacharioudaki.

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Zacharioudaki, A., Pan, S., Simmonds, D. et al. Future wave climate over the west-European shelf seas. Ocean Dynamics 61, 807–827 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-011-0395-6

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