Abstract
HF radar systems wave measurements are evaluated against numerical simulations in the Gulf of Naples (Southeastern Tyrrhenian Sea). Wave measurements are obtained from three CODAR SeaSonde HF radars installed along the coast of the Gulf of Naples. The numerical models employed are WavewatchIII, implemented on a regional scale with a resolution of about 10 km in longitude and latitude in the whole Mediterranean Sea, and SWAN, implemented with a 200 m resolution in the area of interest. Numerical simulations are also validated against experimental data acquired by a buoy installed offshore the Gulf of Naples. The agreement between HF radar measurements and model hindcasts is evaluated through the estimate of statistical error indices for the main wave characteristics (significant wave height, mean period and mean direction). The consistency between wave parameters retrieved by HF radars and hindcasted by the models opens the way to future integration of the two systems as well as to the utilization of HF radar wave parameters that could be envisaged for data assimilation in wave models.
Highlights
Monitoring the physical processes taking place in the nearshore region is a fundamental pre-requisite for a proper integrated management of the coastal zones
Correlation indexes (ρ) show values close to one, whereas the error indexes are characterized by close-to-zero values, indicating coherence among measurements, especially with respect to the significant wave heights (Hs) and the mean periods (Tm)
The color in the scatter plots is scaled according to the frequency of occurrence, i.e. the darker colors refer to conditions that seldom take place either in the buoy and WWIII outcomes, while the brighter colors are related to sea states more frequently encountered in both the numerical model and the buoy measurements
Summary
Monitoring the physical processes taking place in the nearshore region is a fundamental pre-requisite for a proper integrated management of the coastal zones. In this framework, land-based remote sensing by HF radars presently provides a challenging opportunity for simultaneously measuring surface currents and wave parameters (Paduan and Rosenfeld, 1996; Rubio et al, 2017; Capodici et al, 2019). Crombie (1955) described the physics underlying the acquisition by HF radars of the backscatter echo coming from the rough surface of the sea produced by the resonant first-order Bragg waves. Second-order echoes are weaker and noisier than the first-order ones (Gurgel et al, 2006) but information on wave parameters can be derived from this part of the spectrum using methods of integral inversion (Barrick, 1977, 1979; Lipa and Nyden, 2005).
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