Simulating the effects of climate change on waves in the nearshore of Foggy Island Bay
Abstract
Changes in the seasonal extent and duration of Arctic Ocean pack-ice has led to increasing wave heights and lengths in deep waters off the Arctic Alaska coast. Several studies have shown that the open water season has more than doubled from ~50 days in the early 1980s to >120 days today. Moreover, satellite imagery and global climate models indicate that by 2100 the open water season will extend into late November when intense fall storms are frequent leaving the exposed coast and supporting infrastructure vulnerable. Concurrent with this, there is renewed interest in oil exploration and production in the shallow waters of the Central Beaufort Shelf. In order to better understand how changing oceanographic conditions might affect proposed development in Foggy Island east of Prudhoe Bay, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management initiated the Central Beaufort Sea Wave and Hydrodynamic Modeling Study.
During this presentation, we will present an analysis of the changes in the wave climate (i.e. wave height, period, direction, number of rough days) for Foggy Island Bay, AK based on a model-based hindcast of the last forty years (1979-2018) with SWAN (http://swanmodel.sourceforge.net/). This SWAN implementation employs the formulations by Rogers et al. (2016) in which sea ice is explicitly included for both dissipation and scaling of wind input as a function of sea ice. Validation shows that this allows for accurate computation of swell and locally generated wind waves. Moreover, the Mann-Kendall Test and Sen's slope on the computed wave heights, periods and direction, reveal statistically significant and relatively large increases in the nearshore wave climate.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMC003.0016N
- Keywords:
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- 0702 Permafrost;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 0798 Modeling;
- CRYOSPHERE;
- 1621 Cryospheric change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE