A hybrid efficient method to downscale wave climate to coastal areas

Long-term time series of sea state parameters are required in different coastal engineering applications. In order to obtain wave data at shallow water and due to the scarcity of instrumental data, ocean wave reanalysis databases ought to be downscaled to increase the spatial resolution and simulate the wave transformation process. In this paper, a hybrid downscaling methodology to transfer wave climate to coastal areas has been developed combining a numerical wave model (dynamical downscaling) with mathematical tools (statistical downscaling). A maximum dissimilarity selection algorithm (MDA) is applied in order to obtain a representative subset of sea states in deep water areas. The reduced number of selected cases spans the marine climate variability, guaranteeing that all possible sea states are represented and capturing even the extreme events. These sea states are propagated using a state-of-the-art wave propagation model. The time series of the propagated sea state parameters at a particular location are reconstructed using a non-linear interpolation technique based on radial basis functions (RBFs), providing excellent results in a high dimensional space with scattered data as occurs in the cases selected with MDA. The numerical validation of the results confirms the ability of the developed methodology to reconstruct sea state time series in shallow water at a particular location and to estimate different spatial wave climate parameters with a considerable reduction in the computational effort. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.