A 44-year hindcast of wind wave fields over the Baltic Sea

This study presents wind wave fields' characteristics over the Baltic Sea obtained with the WAM model and their verification against observations. This is a part of the HIPOCAS research project funded by the European Union with an objective to obtain a 44-year hindcast of wind, wave, sea-level, and current climatology for European waters and coastal seas for application in coastal and environmental decision processes. A reasonable agreement between the modelled and observed both in-situ and satellite wave data was obtained. A high-resolution homogeneous wave data set generated with the hindcast system created within HIPOCAS provided a large number of possibilities to examine the long-term statistics and variability of the wind wave fields over the Baltic Sea.