A comparative analysis of the wind and significant wave height on the extreme weather events (TC cempaka and TC Dahlia) in the Southern Sea of Java, Indonesia

Abstract

The tropical cyclones (TCs) are a serious danger to marine and coastal areas in the tropics because they cause strong winds and extreme sea wave height. The combination of these two parameters will be dangerous for shipping safety. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of Tropical cyclone on significant wave heights and surface winds in the southern sea of Java with case studies of TC Cempaka (21-29 November 2017) and TC Dahlia (26 November-4 December 2017). The relationship between two parameters was also discussed in this paper. Both of these tropical cyclone events are interesting to study because they occured in the southern sea of Java and in adjacent time periods. Special attention was paid to the southern sea of Java because it had high shipping traffic where 8 locations were used as case studies. Significant wave height and wind conditions were evaluated using data obtained from the European Mid-Term Weather Forecast Center (ECMWF) with 6 hourly temporal resolution (time UTC 00.00, 06.00, 12.00, 18.00) and 0.5 x 0.5 degrees spatial resolution. The obtained results showed that the influence of TC Dahlia on significant wave height and surface wind appears stronger than the influence of TC Cempaka. During TC Dahlia, the strongest relationship between wind and significant wave height was in the southern sea of Central Java 01 and Yogyakarta 01 with correlation coefficients of 0.84 and 0.81, respectively. While the frequency of extreme wave height of 55.56% appeared to occur in the southern seas of West Java 01 and Central Java 01.