Case study of the winter 2013/2014 extreme wave events off the west coast of Ireland

Abstract

Using the third generation WAVEWATCH III wave model in an unstructured formulation, and driven by HARMONIE-AROME mesoscale model hourly winds with a 2.5 km horizontal resolution, we reproduce the winter storms of 2013/2014 and analyse their effect on the western coastline of Ireland. WAVEWATCH III was forced at its ocean boundaries by directional wave spectra obtained from the ECMWF ERA-Interim re-analysis dataset. The wave model has a high resolution grid (up to 225 m resolution in the nearshore) with around 20 000 nodes, producing an abundance of important wave parameters outputted hourly, enabling a high quality, high-resolution analysis of the winter storms of 2013/2014.