WorldWaves: Software to Determine Offshore and Coastal Wave Conditions Applied for the Barents Sea

Increased utilisation of the coastal zone to a multitude of activities including various shoreline developments related to transportation, tourism, fish farming and inceasingly the wind and wave energy industries has lead to a growing demand for reliable information on the wave conditions. Reliable data is also needed with respect to the management and protection of these often fragile environments. Many of those concerned with these wave-impacted environments still use antiquated data sources, usually from offshore waters as, in the absence of long term wave data collected at the site of interest, the calculation of reliable wave statistics at a coastal site is a complicated, time consuming and expensive business, requiring various data sets to be assembled. WorldWaves simplifies and speeds up the accurate modeling of wave conditions in coastal waters by integrating the following under a single Matlab toolbox: High quality long-term wave data offshore all global coasts; worldwide bathymetric and coastline data; SWAN and backward raytracing wave models; sophisticated offshore and near-shore wave statistics toolboxes with tabular and graphical presentations, including a facility to export ASCII time series data at offshore or inshore locations; a geographic module with easy zooming to any area worldwide; tools to set up model grids and display and edit bathymetry and coastline; a facility for the import of user offshore data and export of inshore time series data. In this paper the authors describe the design and implementation of WorldWaves including the fusion of satellite, model and buoy wave and wind data in the global offshore database and the new raytracing model, and the application of the system for the Barents Sea.