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WAVERYS: a CMEMS global wave reanalysis during the altimetry period

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Abstract

As part of the Copernicus Marine Service, WAVERYS is the multi-year wave reanalysis that provides global wave data with a fine grid resolution of 1/5°. This wave reanalysis covers the period 1993–2019 and disseminates 3-h integrated wave parameters describing the sea state at the ocean surface. The wave model used is the version 4 of the model MFWAM, which is driven by sea ice fraction and wind provided by the atmospheric reanalysis ERA5. The WAVERYS includes the assimilation of altimeter wave data and directional wave spectra provided by Sentinel-1. The wave reanalysis includes also wave-current interactions by using 3-h surface current forcing provided by the ocean reanalysis GLORYS. This paper highlights the assessment of wave parameters provided by the WAVERYS. The validation has been performed with independent altimeter significant wave heights and buoy wave data. The results show the good accuracy of scatter index of SWH (significant wave height) which is 8.7% in comparison with HY-2A altimeter. Moreover, we point out that scatter index of SWH from the WAVERYS is improved by about 9% with respect to the ERA5 wave dataset. We also indicate the good accuracy of swell propagation thanks to the assimilation of directional wave spectra. An analysis has been conducted for wave-current interactions and also discussions about extreme values and trend of time series are suggested.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Isabel Garcia-Hermosa (Mercator-Ocean International) for her review of the QUID of the WAVERYS product, which was the first step to the writing of this article. CNES provided us with level 2 wave data of the HY-2A mission. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor whose comments and questions helped greatly to improve our presentation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mercator Ocean International, 10 Rue Hermès, 31520, Ramonville-Saint-Agne, France

    Stéphane Law-Chune, Bruno Levier, Yann Drillet & Marie Drevillon

  2. Météo France, 42 Avenue Gaspard Coriolis, 31100, Toulouse, France

    Lotfi Aouf & Alice Dalphinet

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  1. Stéphane Law-Chune
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Correspondence to Stéphane Law-Chune.

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Responsible Editor: Val Swail

This article is part of the Topical Collection on the 16th International Workshop on Wave Hindcasting and Forecasting in Melbourne, AU, November 10–15, 2019

Appendices

Appendix 1: ST4 physics settings

Table 2 settings for ST4 physics used in the wave model
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Appendix 2: Assimilated altimetry data

Fig. 14
figure 14

List of assimilated satellite data and their period of use. Altimeters are in blue and SAR is in red

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Fig. 15
figure 15

Map of all the SWH altimetry tracks assimilated in the system for June 10, 2017

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Figure 14 shows for each altimetry mission the period of application for the WAVERYS. It can therefore be seen that the most constrained periods are between the years 2002–2006 (5 altimeters) and 2016–2018 (4 altimeters + SAR sentinel 1). Figure 15 shows an illustration of the spatial coverage of the assimilated altimeter data over the course of a day. Because of the orbits’ offset and entanglement, the mesh can be more or less loose or tightened over an area within a day.

Appendix 3: Correction of HY-2A SWH

In this section, we implemented a comparison between the Jason-2 and HY-2A significant wave heights. The analysis is performed at crossovers of ground tracks of the two altimeter missions with a time window of 2 h. We computed super-observations in a box of grid size of 0.5° for the comparison between the Jason-2 and HY-2A. It has been collected 6192 data during the period January to June 2015. Figure 16 shows the scatter plot of SWH from the Jason-2 and HY-2A. It is easy to see that there is a strong underestimation of SWH of HY-2A in comparison with Jason-2. The bias increases for high waves. We then computed an orthogonal linear regression which gives the a and b coefficients of 0.944 and − 0.01, respectively. This relation is used in order to remove the bias of SWH for HY-2A.

Fig. 16
figure 16

Scatter plot of SWH from Jason-2 and HY-2A. The colourbar indicates the density of data, while the purple dashed line shows the orthogonal linear regression with a = 0.944 and b = − 0.01

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Appendix 4: ERA5 SWH and mean wave period trends

Fig. 17
figure 17

Trends for SWH and MWP for ERA5, calculated over the same period and following the same method as in Section 3.2 (compared to Fig. 12e and f for WAVERYS)

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Law-Chune, S., Aouf, L., Dalphinet, A. et al. WAVERYS: a CMEMS global wave reanalysis during the altimetry period. Ocean Dynamics 71, 357–378 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01433-w

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