Calibration of a new wind-wave hindcast in the Western Mediterranean

Wave climate in the Western Mediterranean is presented through the calibration of an update wind wave hindcast spanning the period 1958-2008. The hindcast was obtained with the WAM model (spatial resolution of 1/6°) forced with wind fields from the atmospheric model ARPERA. Significant wave heights (SWH) provided by the hindcast were calibrated using buoy observations with the aim of improving the characterization of the wave climate over the region. The methodology is based on a spatial calibration of the statistical distribution of SWH performed through a non-linear transformation of the Empirical Orthogonal Functions of the modeled data that minimizes the differences with observations. This allows the calibration to be implemented not only at buoy locations, but also all over the model domain. The resulting fields were validated against satellite altimetry observations, showing an average reduction of about 76% in the bias and of about 10% in the root mean squared differences with respect to observations. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.This work has been carried out in the framework of the projects VANIMEDAT-2 (CTM2009-10163-C02-01, funded by the Spanish Marine Science and Technology Program and the E-Plan of the Spanish Government) and ESCENARIOS (funded by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de METeorología)Peer Reviewe