A 40 YEAR WAVE CLIMATOLOGY OF SOUTH EAST QUEENSLAND, USING MODELLED AND IN-SITU WAVE OBSERVATIONS

Abstract

Climate change has the potential to impact weather patterns that drive the Queensland wave climate and increase the intensity of extreme events such as tropical cyclones and east coast lows, due to a widening of the tropics. This will likely result in a changing wave climate, an increase of erosion events and subsequent coastal morphological change throughout the subtropics. Thus, it is important to examine not only the modal wave climate, but also the extreme wave climate. While a number of hind-cast models have been used to assess global wave climates (Perez et al. 2017), there has been an identified lack of regional assessments. Wave climatology assessments for the SEQ region, have consisted of several point specific assessments undertaken predominantly using buoy data, hind-cast data, or visual daily observations. These studies generally agree that tropical cyclone and east coast lows are the dominant source of high energy sea states and beach erosion in SEQ. A 40 year numerical wave hind-cast has been developed using the WaveWatch III (WW3) model version 4.08 (Durrant et al. 2013a, 2013b).