Tools
ToolsDong, Xianghui, Liu, Qingxiang, Zieger, Stefan, Alberello, Alberto, Abdolali, Ali, Sun, Jian, Wu, Kejian and Babanin, Alexander V. (2025) Numerical simulations of ocean surface waves along the Australian coast with a focus on the Great Barrier Reef. Geoscientific Model Development, 18 (17). pp. 5801-5823. ISSN 1991-9603
Preview |
PDF (gmd-18-5801-2025)
- Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (13MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Numerical simulations of ocean surface waves along the Australian coast are performed with the spectral wave model WAVEWATCH III (WW3) and the state-of-the-art physics and numerics. A large-scale, high-resolution (1–15 km) unstructured mesh is designed for better resolving the extensive Australian coastline. Based on verification against altimeter and buoy observations, it is found that the WW3 simulations, with an observation-based source term package (i.e., ST6) and other relevant physical processes, perform reasonably well in predicting wave heights and periods in most regions. Nonetheless, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) represents a challenging region for the wave model, in which wave heights are severely overestimated because most of the individual coral reefs and their strong dissipative effects could not be resolved by the local mesh. A two-step modeling strategy is proposed here to address this problem. First, individual coral reefs are regarded as unresolved obstacles and thus complete barriers to wave energy. Second, we adopt the unresolved obstacles source term proposed recently to parameterize the dissipative impact of these subgrid coral reefs. It is then demonstrated that this subgrid-scale reef parameterization enhances the model performance in the GBR dramatically, reducing the wave height bias from above 100 % to below 20 %. The source term balance and the sensitivity of model results to the grid resolution around the GBR are also discussed, illustrating the applicability of this two-step strategy to km-scale wave simulations.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Code and data availability: The versions of WAVEWATCH III, OceanMesh2D, and alphaBetaLab used in this study, along with the model setup files for the unstructured simulations, are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15171745 (Dong et al., 2025a). The forcing and observational datasets used in this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15179446 (Dong et al., 2025b). The two-dimensional wave spectra along open boundaries were obtained from the WW3-ST6 global wave hindcast of Liu et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4497717, Liu and Babanin, 2021). Financial support: This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2022YFC3105002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 42106012), the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Fund for Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program (Overseas) (grant no. 2023HWYQ-056), the Taishan Scholars Program (grant no. tsqnz20221111), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 202441007). |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Fluids & Structures |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Sep 2025 14:30 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Sep 2025 14:30 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100315 |
| DOI: | 10.5194/gmd-18-5801-2025 |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |