A comparative analysis of the wind and wave climate in the Black Sea along the shipping routes

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to assess the wind and wave climate in the Black Sea while considering various data sources. A special attention is given to the areas with higher navigation traffic. Thus, the results are analyzed for the sites located close to themain harbors and also along themajor trading routes. The wind conditions were evaluated considering two different data sets, the reanalysis data provided by NCEP-CFSR (U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction-Climate Forecast SystemReanalysis) and the hindcast results given by a Regional ClimateModel (RCM) thatwere retrieved from EURO-CORDEX (European Domain-Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment). For the waves, there were considered the results coming from simulations with the SWAN (Simulating Wave Nearshore) model, forced with the above-mentioned two different wind fields. Based on these results, it can be mentioned that the offshore sites seem to show the best correlation between the two datasets for both wind and waves. As regards the nearshore sites, there is a good agreement between the average values of the wind data that are provided by the different datasets, except for the points located in the southern part of the Black Sea. The same trends noticed for the average values remain also valid for the extreme values. Finally, it can be concluded that the results obtained in this study are useful for the evaluation of the wind and wave climate in the Black Sea. Also, they give a more comprehensive picture on how well the wind field provided by the Regional ClimateModel, and the wave model forced with this wind, can represent the features of a complex marine environment as the Black Sea is.