Errors of Tropical Cyclone-Induced Ocean Waves in Reanalysis Using Buoy Data

• Published in: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
• Main Authors: Yalan Zhang, Wei Zhong, Zhihao Feng, Ruilin Wang, Yuan Sun, Zongbao Bai
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2024
• Subjects: tropical cyclone; ocean wave; buoy data; reanalysis data; ERA5; WAVERYS; Naval architecture. Shipbuilding. Marine engineering; VM1-989; Oceanography; GC1-1581; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12060983; https://doaj.org/article/2c302af380c74b148ac9ee834cab8d9b

Due to limited in-situ ocean observations, reanalysis data are often considered as an important source for studying tropical cyclone (TC)-induced ocean waves. Here, we introduced a method to quantitatively evaluate the errors of TC-induced ocean waves in reanalysis datasets. The TC data are from the IBTrACS dataset. We compared TC-induced ocean waves in two reanalysis datasets (i.e., ERA5 and WAVERYS) with those in buoy data when TCs are near the buoy stations. We showed that the errors of TC-induced ocean waves in WAVERYS and ERA5 are similar, because the surface winds in these two datasets are the same. We noticed that the errors in the North Pacific are remarkably smaller than those in the North Atlantic due to more realistic probability density of TC-induced ocean waves in the North Pacific compared with those in the North Atlantic. Moreover, the errors are strongly related to significant wave height (SWH) and the distance from TC center. The larger the SWH and the shorter the distance, the larger the error. Furthermore, the errors in TC-induced ocean waves decreased significantly over the past decades.