Estimation of long-term wave statistics in the East China Sea.

Chen, Y. P., Xie, D. M., Zhang, C. K, Qian, X. S., 2013. Estimation of long-term wave statistics in the East China Sea. This study used a state-of-the-art approach to estimate the long-term wave statistics in the East China Sea. The wave climate in the past 60 years (1950-2009) was simulated by a third generation wave model driven by the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis wind data. Based on the statistical analysis of the numerical results, the mean wave fields and the extreme wave fields with 100-year and 50-year return period on the whole computational domain were obtained. The spatial variations of the wave fields show that the statistical waves decrease from south to north and from sea to coast in general, which can be associated with the local topography of the East China Sea. The seasonal variations show that the mean waves in the winter and autumn are slightly larger than those in the spring and summer, while the extreme waves in the summer are much larger than those in the other seasons, which is mainly due to the seasonal variation of monsoonal winds and the occurrence of typhoon events in the summer. The outputs of this paper are helpful to understand the distribution of mean and extreme waves in the East China Sea, and also useful to calculate the design waves in the coastal area if nearshore wave model like the SWAN model is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]