Wave Climate at Shallow Waters along the Abu Dhabi Coast

Abstract

High-resolution, reliable global atmospheric and oceanic numerical models can represent a key factor in designing a coastal intervention. At the present, two main centers have the capabilities to produce them: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S.A. and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The NOAA and ECMWF wave models are developed, in particular, for different water regions: deep, intermediate, and shallow water regions using different types of spatial and temporal grids. Recently, in the Arabian Gulf (also named Persian Gulf), the Abu Dhabi Municipality (ADM) installed an ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) to observe the atmospheric and oceanographic conditions (water level, significant wave height, peak wave period, water temperature, and wind speed and direction) at 6 m water depth, in the vicinity of the shoreline of the Saadiyat beach. Courtesy of Abu Dhabi Municipality, this observations dataset is available; the recorded data span the period from June 2015 to January 2018 (included), with a time resolution of 10 min and 30 min for the atmospheric and oceanographic variables, respectively. At the ADCP deployment location (ADMins), the wave climate has been determined using wave propagation of the NOAA offshore wave dataset by means of the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) numerical model, the NOAA and ECMWF wave datasets at the closest grid point in shallow water conditions, and the SPM ’84 hindcasting method with the NOAA wind dataset used as input. It is shown that the best agreement with the observed wave climate is obtained using the SPM ’84 hindcasting method for the shallow water conditions.