Long-term and extreme wave climate of the Black Sea

Abstract

In order to find out the wave climate affecting the whole Black Sea and the Turkish coasts on other seas, a comprehensive research project, called NATO TU-WAVES Project, was carried out during 1994-2001 with a generous financial support from the NATO Science for Stability programme-Phase III. The project included systematic wave measurements, wave modeling and wave climate computations. Several important results were obtained during the course of the project. Wind-wave hindcasting for an extensive number of storms were carried out by using two advanced wave models, METU3 and WAM together with two wind sources, the analysis wind fields of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) and the synoptic weather maps of Turkish State Meteorological Services (SMS). This paper presents several important results obtained from the analysis of the long-term and extreme statistical distributions of the significant wave height over the Black Sea. They include the wave roses, occurrence and persistency statistics of sea states and calm periods, aerial distributions of the significant wave height for various return periods.