PERFORMANCES OF THE RIP CURRENT WARNING SYSTEM AT THE HAEUNDAE COAST OF SOUTH KOREA

Abstract

Haeundae is one of the most beautiful beaches in Korea, and is also notorious for frequent and strong rip currents. Every recent year in this beach, hundreds of swimmers rescued from rip currents have been reported. The large-scale Haeundae rip current is known to be a kind of transient rip currents which is hardly predicted. The successive ends of wave-crest pattern (i.e., honeycomb wave-crest pattern(Dalrymple et al., 2011)), which generate rip current, are mainly formed by two-directional wave trains due to the refraction of incident swells over submerged shoals and ridges of the Haeundae coast. Many people are caught by the rip current in the relatively calm sea and weather conditions. The incident waves generating rip currents are nearly monochromatic with the wave period of 7-13 seconds. These swells are supposed to be generated by distant typhoons formed in the Philippine Sea. Some of them might propagate with dispersion and dissipation during the travel toward the south coast of the Korean Peninsula, especially to the Haeundae coast. In order to protect the swimmers from the rip current accidents, Choi et al. (2014) proposed a method for a rip current warning system, and Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Administration (KHOA) has established and operated the rip current warning system to the Haeundae beach. The rip current warning system estimates the rip current risk level based on the real-time incident wave conditions measured near the beach and the database pre-calculated by a numerical model according to various wave and tide conditions and the topography of the Haeundae coast. The Boussinesq wave model, FUNWAVE (Wei et al., 1999; Choi et al., 2015) was utilized for resolving the ends of the wave crests. This study showed the performance of the forecast and warning system of the rip current at the Haeundae coast of South Korea.