In this work, the spatio-temporal behaviour of wind and sea states in the Hellenic Seas is examined and described. The wind and wave hindcast data used in the analysis are in the form of a 10-year long (1995-2004) time series, obtained from the SKIRON-Eta weather model and the WAM wave model. The Gamma, log-normal and Weibull distributions fitted HS and UW data fairly well. The assessment of the auto- and cross-correlation functions of Hs (τ) and Uw2 (τ) revealed a stable behaviour of the wave process memory (3.5 - 4.5 days) and a more complicated behavior for wind speed. By examining the interannual variability of Hs (τ) and Uw (τ), a small ascending trend was found (of the order of 10-12mm per year for HS and 0.02-0.04m/s per year for UW).
In this work, the long-term spatio-temporal behaviour of wind and sea states in the Hellenic Seas is assessed and described. The 10-year period (1995-2004) wind and wave hindcast data for the examined have been generated by the improved non-hydrostatic SKIRON-Eta weather model and the 3rd generation WAM-cycle 4 wave model, using a spatial resolution of 0.1ºx0.1º and a temporal resolution of three hours. The meteorological input used for defining the initial and boundary conditions of the weather model were obtained from the analysis fields, produced at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The application area of the wave model was extended from 70W to 420E and from 30.250N to 45.250N . The particular geographical coverage has been considered adequate for the proper wave development and propagation simulation in the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins. The wind and wave data referring to the Hellenic Seas have been recently presented in the form of a Wind and Wave Atlas; see Soukissian et al. (2007a, 2007b).
