Upgrades and Improvements to the Operational Great Lakes Wave Modeling System
Abstract
Providing accurate forecasts of wind waves is crucial to many environmental and societal issues in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Wave Model (GLWU) currently provides guidance with hourly cycles to 11 Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) in the Great Lakes region. The model is forced by wind fields from the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) for consistency between the atmospheric and wave forecasts. In the upcoming GLWUv2 upgrade, the smaller Lake Champlain is added to the system on an unstructured grid with resolution ranging from approximately 50 m in dynamic coastal regions, to approximately 400 m in less-dynamic offshore areas. Moreover the WAVEWATCH III model core is updated to take advantage of most recent advancements in the model, and the resolution of the sea ice concentration analysis in the five Great Lakes will be increased from 5 km to 500 m. The Lake Champlain portion of the system is forced with atmospheric wind data from NCEP's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR)/Global Forecast System (GFS) and ice coverage data from National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in Burlington, VT. The reforecast simulations for the updated system are validated against the operational GLWU forecasts over the five Great Lakes, and against an experimental real-time forecasting system for Lake Champlain operated by the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab (GLERL). The results of this validation study show the accuracy of the updated model against buoy observations in the five Great Lakes and for the newly-generated mesh for Lake Champlain.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMOS55A..07B