ABSTRACT
The project HIPOCAS: “Hindcast of Dynamic Processes of the Ocean and Coastal Areas of Europe” (Guedes Soares, 2008) has generated a 44-year wave hindcast data over the North Atlantic Ocean and the coast of Portugal. The state-ofthe-art wave model WAM was used for the wave hindcast that allows for two way nesting (Lahoz et al., 1997). The aim was to improve the wave data over the North Eastern Atlantic and in the coastal waters of Europe. The WAM model uses wind fields as input. The quality and accuracy of the hindcasts depends on the quality of the wind fields. The hindcasts are quite sensitive to the input wind fields as demonstrated by several authors (Teixeira et al., 1995; Holthuijsen et al., 1996). The wave data generated by this model is a consistent database and have been validated with buoy measurements, e.g. Pilar et al. (2006). The HIPOCAS hindcast data was calibrated and validated with the NOAA/NCEP datasets (Campos & Guedes Soares 2012) showing that the two datasets are very similar in the area of study (latitudes between 20º and 68ºN and longitudes between 50º West and 04º
1 INTRODUCTION
The design of ship, offshore, and coastal structures requires a clear picture of the wave climate of the oceanic region that they are to be operated. This is often difficult to deduce because the amount of data for the purpose is sometimes scarce. Recently, there has been a growing concern on the need of long-term information about prevailing environmental conditions in order to assess the climate and plan sustainable development of economic and scientific activities in coastal waters. Therefore, it has been a concern of several authors in improving the availability, quality and reliability of these databases. It is known that high uncertainty of environmental data may lead to an inappropriate design of marine structures thereby lead to significant economic loss and failure of structures (Bitner-Gregersen & Guedes Soares 2007). In the previous decades, a large amount of wave data collected “in situ” in several parts of the world by several institutes and companies have made possible to provide a reliable wave statistics.