10. WAVE AND WIND CLIMATE

Data on wave and wind climate are provided at 237 locations all along the European coastline. In this example, along the Greek coastline, information on the mean wind speed (at 10 meters above sea level) has been depicted. At each location, 8 arrows are displayed: one for each direction. The size of the arrow gives an indication of the dominant wind direction and is an important input to estimate the water level rise in case of surge.


Data description

This layer provides information on wave and wind climate at 237 locations along the European coastline. These locations are situated 50 to 100 km away from the shoreline. Distance from one location to another location is approximately 100 km.
For each location, the data included in the layer provide the following parameters:

  • average wind speed
  • wind speed exceeded by 10% of the measurements
  • wind speed exceeded by 1% of the measurements
  • average wave height
  • wave height exceeded by 10% of the measurements
  • wave heights exceeded by 1% of the measurements
  • average wave period
  • wave period exceeded by 10% of the measurements
  • wave period exceeded by 1% of the measurements

These parameters are provided for the following directional sectors: 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, and 315 degrees.

Source of data

Data were entirely generated from the EUROSION project. The parameters listed above were statistically processed from the database waveclimate.com distributed by the dutch company ARGOSS. waveclimate.com database contains up to 17 years of wind- and wave data (1985-2001). Observations of wave height and wind speed come from altimeters carried by ERS-1, ERS-2, Topex/Poseidon and Geosat satellites. The scatterometer sensors onboard ERS-1 and ERS-2 supplied the wind speed and wind direction data. Wave spectral parameters were derived from spectra of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagettes collected by ERS-1 and ERS-2 using an algorithm developed by ARGOSS [Mastenbroek and de Valk, 2000]. Production of statistical estimate for the parameters listed above were carried out over « boxes » of 200kmx200km. Each box overlaps with the adjacent boxes with an approximative 50% rate, and results are attached to the box centre (see screenshot above). As a consequence, data are provided with a 100km resolution along the European coast.

Geographical
restrictions

No data have been computed for the ultraperipheral regions and for Cyprus.
Quality Source data have been severely checked and corrected. Double control on the quality of the produced database is currently ensured. Residual Mean Square Error (RMSE) of wave height estimates does not exceed 15%, though the RMSE of wind speed does not exceed 20%.
Copyright and data access conditions Though ARGOSS database is copyrighted, statistics generated from it are copyright-free and are therefore publicly available inside and outside the European Commission.