Impacts of Typhoon Vae and Linda on wind waves in the Upper Gulf of Thailand and East Coast

Abstract

The Upper Gulf of Thailand and east coast are the locations of the 3 important deepsea ports of Thailand, namely Bangkok port, Laem Chabang port and Map Ta Phut port which needed wind wave data for designs of port structures and navigation of cargo vessels and container ships to and from the ports. In the past, most wave data in the Gulf of Thailand were computed from wind data using the methodproposed by Silvester and Vongvisessomjai (1970). Recently, Pornpinatepong et al. (1999) used the WAM Model to predict wind waves in the Gulf of Thailand and Andaman Sea using waves initially from satellites ERS-2 and TOPEX and later from 9 oceanographic buoys in the Gulf of Thailand and 2 buoys in the Andaman Sea for model calibration. This study presents wind waves in 6 years (1997-2002) from the WAM Model at Petchaburi and Sichang buoys in the Upper Gulf of Thailand as well as Rayong and Ko Chang buoys on the east coast. Since the big waves in the study area are generated by strong winds of cyclones, emphasis is placed to the wind waves generated during the passage of cyclones Vae in 1952 formerly provided by Vongvisessomjai (1994b) and new data of Linda in 1997. Cyclonic waves are second in size to the tsunami waves in the Andaman Sea on December 26, 2004