Considering the effects of sea waves on offshore wind simulations in the
Weather Research and Forecasting model
Abstract
One of key factors in simulating offshore wind field is con- sidering
the effects of waves on momentum and energy ex- changes between the
atmosphere and ocean. However, most NWP models traditionally overlook
the effects of waves, due to the lack of suitable roughness length
parameterization. To address this issue, coupling atmospheric and wave
mod- els has emerged which handles the wind-wave interaction through the
exchange of a few quantities between two mod- els. On the other hand,
integrating atmospheric and wave models requires substantial
computational resources and as- sociated expenses. In this study, we
developed an offline wave coupling method in the WRF to account for wave
ef- fects on wind field simulations. With this method, the WRF is
modified to read wave parameters and bathymetry data, and to
parameterize roughness length using these data. Our study aims to
evaluate the offline method by comparing it to an online coupling system
that uses the coupled atmosphere and wave models, as well as observation
data. We found that the offline method utilizes almost 17% fewer
computational resources and 19% less computational time compared to the
online method, while maintaining identical forecasting accu- racy.
Evaluation of the results during dominant swell con- dition suggested
that both methods are able to reduce the forecast uncertainty compared
to LiDAR measurement spe- cially in the lower part of atmosphere.