Mrs Aihong Zhong¹, Dr  Robert Greenwood², Dr Stefan Zieger³, Dr Tony Hirst⁴, Mr  Charles Sanders⁵

¹Bureau Of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia, ²Bureau Of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia, ³Bureau Of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia, ⁴Bureau of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia, ⁵Bureau of Meteorology, Docklands, Australia

The Bureau of Meteorology is Australia’s national agency responsible for warning mariners, industry, and the community of dangerous or damaging waves affecting people and structures along the Australian coastline and high seas.  The Bureau’s marine and high seas warning services to the community rely on wave modelling capabilities. 

The Australian wave model (AUSWAVE), based on the third-generation wind wave modelling framework WAVEWATCH III® (WW3) has been the operational sea-state model run by the Bureau National Operations Centre since August 2010. The AUSWAVE system is forced by the surface winds from the Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system.  Over the past decade, there were four major upgrades to the operational wave models.

This presentation covers the most recent changes to the operational wave model configurations which include introduction of a new multiple-resolution global wave prediction system (AUSWAVE-G3) to replace both the global (AUSWAVE-G) and regional (AUSWAVE-R) systems, which features an increase of the global wave model spatial resolution to ~12.5km spatial resolution globally to match with ACCESS-G3 horizontal resolution with refinement around sub-grid scale features at ~6.25km over shallow/coastal regions. The wave model source code has been upgraded from the third-generation wind-wave modelling framework WAVEWATCH III® (WW3) version 4.18 to 6.07. This includes enhanced wave physics by introducing source term (ST6) to replace the ST4 source term package for improved parametrisation of wind input and swell dissipation terms. This new model allows one-way ocean and currents interaction. The ocean current fields are input from the real-time OceanMAPS. The performance of the new global wave forecast system will be assessed against calibrated satellite altimetry data from Radar Altimeter Database (RADS) and in-situ wave rider buoys along the Australian coasts.

Biography:

Ms Aihong Zhong obtained her Masters (Honour) Degree in Earth Sciences at Macquarie University in 1996 and she joined the Bureau of Meteorology in 1999.  She works as senior research scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology to operationalise the Bureau’s Wave Forecast Systems developed by research team and is responsible for supporting operational running of the Bureau’s oceanographic systems.