Applicability of a Long-Term Wave Hindcast System in the Inner Bay Areas and Seto Inland Sea of Japan Using SDP Measurement-Based Winds

Abstract

A 45-year wave hindcast system on a nested grid with high space resolution is applied to investigate the long-term wave conditions in the inner bay areas and inland sea of Japan from Tokyo Bay to the western Seto Inland Sea. The system is driven station by station by hourly sea wind distributions evaluated using both the typhoon-embedded analysis wind data archive in the open ocean and the land-based measurement(SDP) wind data in the bay areas. Reasonable agreement between the hindcasts and measurements for wave statistics in each bay area shows that the system is sufficient to closely reproduce the long-term wave conditions in the concerned sea areas but that use of other types of wind data archives with temporal homogeneity may be desirable to more properly evaluate the long-term variation of wave conditions.