On the Accuracy of Surface Wind and Wind-Wave Data

The available sources of surface wind and wave data can be classified: in-situ measurements, remotely sensed observations and numerical predictions. Recent decades witnessed improvements in the availability, coverage and accuracy of all these sources. The estimation of the accuracy of (or better: the errors associated with) various wind and wave data is very important for better utilisation of such data. Some of the recent efforts along this line are reviewed. Globally for a whole year (August 2009-July 2010), the buoy and altimeter errors for surface wind speed were found to vary around 1 m.s(-1) (which corresponds to about 11-14% of the mean value) while those for significant wave height to vary between 0.13 and 0.25 m (about 5 to 10%). The 1-day forecast errors from the ECMWF model are not very different. Wind speed and wave height errors have almost linear dependency on the value of the parameter except for the model wind speed which shows no dependency for speeds below 13 m.s(-1) and linear dependency for higher winds.