Wave forecasting in Prince William Sound (Alaska)

There is an established need for accurate ocean weather predictions in many coastal regions, and we have begun to address this problem for various coastal domains in the Gulf of Maine, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico. Prince William Sound (PWS) in Gulf of Alaska, for instance, has been the site of a catastrophic oil spill, and the PWS Oil Spill Recovery Institute has placed much emphasis on environmental prediction to assist mariners. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of available wind data on the prediction of wave heights in PWS. For this purpose, global (low resolution) as well as the local (high resolution) wind-fields are compared to the available buoy data and subsequently used to drive a state-of-the-art wave model, SWAN. The model results, in hind-cast mode, are compared for a period of 16 days using all available wind-fields (local as well as global); while in forecast mode, forecast skill is evaluated with respect to the available buoy data.