Hindcasting of tropical cyclone winds and waves

This paper describes a series of hindcast simulations of 17 tropical cyclones over the northwest shelf region of Australia. Tropical cyclone track and vortex details were obtained from the Bureau of Meteorology “Best Track” database. Wind fields were simulated using a dynamic boundary layer model referred to as the Kepert-Wang model. Surface wind and pressure fields were blended with background fields from the ERA-Interim dataset. These blended wind fields were then used as forcing for the WAVEWATCH III wave model to generate wave fields. Several different configurations of wave model source terms were trialled. Wind and wave models were validated against available observations from the Bureau of Meteorology and our industry partner. The mean absolute error for peak significant wave height (Hs) for all configurations was mostly less than 0.90 m, compared to a mean observed peak Hs of 4.8 m, and the bias was less than around 0.41 m. It was found that while in general the ST6 wave model source term physics package with NL3 non-linear interactions performs well overall, there is no single configuration that performs best for all 17 tropical cyclones.