An assessment on the impact of wind forcing on simulation and validation of wave spectra at coastal Puducherry, east coast of India

In context to application of numerical ocean wave prediction, the validation of ocean wave spectra is a research topic of active interest. This study summarizes the results of validation performed with wave spectra using SWAN model off coastal Puducherry, located in the east coast of India. The impact of wind forcing from ECMWF ERA Interim winds and QuikSCAT-NCEP blended winds on resultant wave spectra has also been studied. The study signifies a good correlation between model wave spectra and in-situ observations. Impact of using the two wind field products in predicting extreme wave events was analyzed considering a storm case of November 2008. The numerical results revealed that the blended winds are more suitable in comparison with the ECMWF ERA Interim winds for modeling both normal and extreme events in the coastal Puducherry location. The results also show that wave model output is critically sensitive to the choice of the wind field product, such that the quality of the wind fields is reflected in the quality of the wave predictions. Based on model simulations it is concluded that blended winds generate more realistic wave fields in coastal location and can reproduce the growth and decay of waves in the real-time.