Predicting significant wave height off the northeast coast of the United States

To develop a simple method to predict the significant wave height, we analyze 18 years of hourly observations from 12 different buoys that are off the northeast coast of the United States. Water depths ranged from 19 to 4427 m for these moored buoys. We find that, on average, all of these buoys exhibit a region of constant wave height for 10-m wind speeds between 0 and 4 m s−1. That wave height does, however, depend on water depth. For wind speeds above 4 m s–1, the wave height increases as the square of the wind speed; but the multiplicative factor is again a function of water depth. We synthesize these results in a prediction scheme that yields the significant wave height from simple functions of water depth and 10-m wind speed for wind speeds up to 25 m s–1.