Abstract
The 21st century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) proposed by China strongly promotes the maritime industry. In this paper, we use wind and ocean wave datasets from 1979 to 2014 to analyze the spatial and temporal distributions of the wind speed, significant wave height (SWH), mean wave direction (MWD), and mean wave period (MWP) in the MSR. The analysis results indicate that the Luzon Strait and Gulf of Aden have the most obvious seasonal variations and that the central Indian Ocean is relatively stable. We analyzed the distributions of the maximum wind speed and SWH in the MSR over this 36-year period. The results show that the distribution of the monthly average frequency for SWH exceeds 4 m (huge waves) and that of the corresponding wind speed exceeds 13.9 m s−1 (high wind speed). The occurrence frequencies of huge waves and high winds in regions east of the Gulf of Aden are as high as 56% and 80%, respectively. We also assessed the wave and wind energies in different seasons. Based on our analyses, we propose a risk factor (RF) for determining navigation safety levels, based on the wind speed and SWH. We determine the spatial and temporal RF distributions for different seasons and analyze the corresponding impact on four major sea routes. Finally, we determine the spatial distribution of tropical cyclones from 2000 to 2015 and analyze the corresponding impact on the four sea routes. The analysis of the dynamic characteristics of the MSR provides references for ship navigation as well as ocean engineering.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the ECMWF for providing the ERA-Interim dataset. This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under contract No. 2016YFC1402703 and the National Youth Natural Science Foundation under contract No. 61501130. The work is also supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under contract No. 16CX02033A. The best tracks of tropical cyclones were downloaded from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs/index.php?name=ibtracs-data-access).
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Zhang, X., Zhang, J., Fan, C. et al. Analysis of Dynamic Characteristics of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. J. Ocean Univ. China 17, 487–497 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-018-3467-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11802-018-3467-0