Spatio-temporal wave climate using nested numerical wave modeling in the northern Indian Ocean

In order to simulate the wave climate in a specific region for different purposes such as climate change impact assessment, wave energy assessment, etc., it is important to consider the long-term variations (Shimura et al., 2015). Due to the scarcity of the wave measurements, numerically modeled wave data are an appropriate alternative to provide the wave characteristics in desired spatial and temporal coverage. There are limited studies which investigated the wave climate in the northern Indian Ocean. Amrutha et al. (2016) studied the wave climate in the eastern Arabian Sea at the west of India by comparison of the results of a nested numerical modeling with buoy data. Kamranzad et al. (2016) also assessed the temporal-spatial variation of wave energy and nearshore hotspots in northern Gulf of Oman based on the locally generated wind waves. In this study, wave modeling performance is investigated in the northern Indian Ocean (NIO) considering long distance swells. A nested wave modeling was utilized in the NIO to discuss the accuracy of wave simulation both temporally (by comparing to buoy dataset) and spatially (by comparing to the satellite altimeter records in the domain). High temporal resolution is important to consider the peak events for extreme value analysis, while the accurate estimation of spatial distribution is important for long-term variation of average wave climate in a domain.