Large-scale hurricane modeling using domain decomposition parallelization and implicit scheme implemented in WAVEWATCH III wave model

Abstract

WAVEWATCH III has been equipped with a new parallelization algorithm, domain decomposition and an optional implicit numerical scheme for coastal application at high spatial resolution with triangular unstructured grids, compatible with community-based coupling infrastructure. We performed a validation study for Hurricane Ike (2008) to prove the accuracy of the updated model against satellite altimeter data and buoy observations on various grids, forced by two sophisticated atmospheric models for hurricane simulation, using different solution schemes and parallelization algorithms. The new implementations for triangular grids are computationally efficient and scalable to be run on a large number of computational nodes, which constitutes a major breakthrough in the context of increasing needs for high-resolution nearshore wave modeling, making WAVEWATCH III (WW3) a powerful tool to simulate the sea state in the nearshore at high resolution and study wave-surge interactions in inner shelf regions.