The Australian wave forecast system with statistical wind correction

Stefan Zieger

doi:10.1071/ES25010

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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The Australian wave forecast system with statistical wind correction

Stefan Zieger

^A ^*

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Vic., Australia.

^* Correspondence to: stefan.zieger@bom.gov.au, media@bom.gov.au
Media enquiries: media@bom.gov.au

Handling Editor: Anthony Rea

Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science 75, ES25010 https://doi.org/10.1071/ES25010

Submitted: 28 February 2025 Accepted: 17 May 2025 Published: 27 June 2025

© 2025 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Bureau of Meteorology. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

The Bureau of Meteorology (the Bureau) has an important role in providing marine services around Australia and its oceans. These services strongly depend on guidance from numerical wave models, which depend on numerical weather and ocean prediction systems. The Bureau has upgraded its collective suite of all numerical models to the Australian Parallel Suite (APS) 4. The APS systems have vastly improved their skill because of increased resolution, enhanced data assimilation (including increasing numbers and types of observations) and improvements in physical parameterisations. This paper verifies the skill of the numerical weather prediction model and the underlying wave model using observations from satellite systems and wave buoys. The characteristics of the surface winds led to the development of a statistical wind correction (i.e. bias correction) that superseded the flux-scaling applied in the APS3 version. Comparisons to the legacy wave model and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast reanalysis ERA5 indicate that the Bureau’s global wave forecast system outperforms both across a few metrics. Satellite altimetry verification shows an improvement in root-mean-square error, variability, probability of exceedance and probability density function. Wave buoy verification around Australia agrees with the skill assessment from satellite altimeters. Looking at the root-mean-square error of significant wave height, there is an estimated mean error of 0.29 m for altimeter observations and across 84 wave buoy locations.

Keywords: AUSWAVE, ERA5, ST6, wave forecasting, wave model, wave verification, WAVEWATCH III, wind bias correction.

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