The source terms of wind input, depth-induced wave breaking, and bottom friction, in the SWAN wave model, are investigated with NDBC buoy data during two hurricane processes in Carolinas coastal ocean. It is found that SWAN results with Komen wind input are more consistent with buoy data than those with Janssen wind input. It seems that SWAN results with Collins and Madsen et al. bottom friction are closer to buoy data than those with JONSWAP bottom friction. It is found that the depth-induced breaking is significant in coastal wave modeling during hurricane processes.
Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) wave model (Booij et al., 1999) is a third-generation numerical wave model, which represents the state-of-art of wave modeling. In principle SWAN could be applied to both coastal regions and open sea. Currently SWAN is widely used for theoretical and application purposes. However some source terms are optional in SWAN. Two wind input parameterizations are adopted in SWAN. One is proposed by Komen et al. (1984) and the other is due to Janssen (1991). The former is the default option. Three bottom friction parameterizations are used in SWAN, which include JONSWAP (Hasselmann et al., 1973), Collins (1972) and Madsen et al. (1988). The default bottom friction is JONSWAP. The effect of depth-induced wave breaking (Booij and Janssen, 1978) can be deactivated in SWAN. It is worth testing the effect of running SWAN with different source terms. In the present study, the performance of the wind input, bottom friction parameterizations and depth-induced breaking is investigated with NDBC buoy data during hurricane processes in Carolinas coastal ocean.
For this investigation, the SWAN wave model (Booij et al., 1999), version 40.11, is used. The governing equation of SWAN is the action balance equation.
