THE PERFORMANCE OF THE CANADIAN SPECTRAL OCEAN WAVE MODEL (CSOWM) DURING THE GRAND-BANKS ERS-1 SAR WAVE SPECTRA VALIDATION EXPERIMENT

CSOWM is Environment Canada's operational wave model that is operated daily at the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) in Montreal and is d riven by surface winds generated by the regional weather prediction mo del of CMC. For the duration of the Grand Banks ERS-1 SAR wave spectra validation field experiment, two versions of CSOWM - a first generati on (1G) version and a third generation (3G) version - were used in a h indcast mode to generate wave model products. In addition, two sets of wind fields, one obtainable from the CMC weather prediction model and the other obtained through a hand-analysis of 3-hourly surface pressu re charts and an application of a marine planetary boundary-layer mode l, were used to generate wave model products. The various wave model p roducts were evaluated against wind and wave measurements made over th e study site and also against available buoy data from the network of Canadian buoys on the Grand Banks and the Scotian Shelf regions of the Canadian Atlantic. The evaluation suggests that both versions of CSOW M performed reasonably well and generated error statistics that were q uite comparable with those generated by some of the operational wave m odels presently implemented in national weather services of many count ries. Further, the wave model products generated using winds obtainabl e from hand-analysed surface pressure charts had the closest overall a greement with buoy measurements and this in turn led to an improvement in the error statistics and in model spectra. The results presented h ere have provided a degree of confidence in the use of CSOWM products for further analysis on SAR data assimilation in wave models.