Develop an ocean-atmosphere-wave regional coupled model Windwave version 1.0 for predicting wind and wave conditions of the Northwest Pacific Ocean

Abstract

A new ocean-atmosphere-wave regional coupled model named Windwave version 1.0 for simulating and predicting winds and waves has been developed for the Northwest Pacific Ocean. In particular, the global-to-regional nesting technique is adopted for the ocean component to alleviate the bias due to the inconsistency in the lateral boundary. This paper is devoted to describing the coupling details of Windwave and the initialization scheme and assessing its basic performance, especially in predicting surface winds and significant wave heights (SWH) on the weather timescale. The control experiment set contains 31 experiments for August 2020, with seven typhoons passing through the Northwest Pacific. Each experiment starts at 0:00 am UTC of each day and runs for three days. Experiment results show that the new coupled model performs well in predicting surface winds, SWH, surface air temperature, and sea surface temperature on the weather timescale. In particular, the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSEs) of surface winds at 10 m height over the Northwest Pacific of the control experiment are 1.82 m s-1, 2.22 m s-1, and 2.59 m s-1, respectively, at lead times of 24 h, 48 h, and 72 h. Meanwhile, the RMSEs of SWH at lead times of 24 h, 48 h, and 72 h are 0.39 m, 0.43 m, and 0.51 m. In addition, we have explored the impacts of the different sea surface aerodynamic roughness parameterization schemes on predicting surface winds and SWH. In total, five different sea surface aerodynamic roughness parameterization schemes are adopted, corresponding to one control set and four sensitivity sets of experiments. Under normal conditions, the sea surface aerodynamic roughness parameterization scheme considering the effects of wind-wave direction tends to perform better for winds and waves, while that depending on wave age and SWH tends to perform worse. Under extreme wind and wave conditions, the schemes considering the effects of wind-wave direction and that considering wave age and peak wave length have better performance. These findings can provide new insights for developing a more advanced sea surface aerodynamic roughness parameterization scheme.