BAMS is an Oceanweather Joint Industry Project with the objective to develop one of the hindcast databases needed to assess the wind and wave criteria needed in aid of design of terminal developments in the coastal waters of the stretch of the Pacific Coast of North America from roughly Long Beach, California to Ensenada, Mexico. In general, the study area is exposed to sea states associated with extratropical systems in the greater North and South Pacific Oceans and tropical cyclones of the eastern North Pacific Ocean (NPO). In this study, only tropical cyclones are considered. A hindcast approach is adopted using Oceanweather’s (OWI) proven methodology. The target population includes 18 tropical cyclones from the period 1939-2001.
This domain is resolved with a grid spacing of 0.625 degrees latitude by 1.25 deg longitude and only deep-water processes are considered. The BASIN domain consists of that part of the GROW domain which covers the eastern NPO and which is driven by boundary spectra saved in GROW along the International Dateline and along the Equator. The BASIN grid has half the grid spacing of the GROW grid and produces the forcing for the REGIONAL domain, which extends from Point Conception southward and eastward to well offshore northern Baja. GROW and BASIN models use deep water wave physics. The REGIONAL wave model includes shallow water effects and explicit resolution of the major channel and offshore islands. The grid spacing of the REGIONAL model grid is 0.03125 degrees (3.5 km).
The BASIN grid is a single nest grid with spacing of 0.3125 degrees in latitude by 0.6250 degrees in longitude, yielding a grid with minimum spacing of 29 km. After deductions for land the grid contains 21,927 points. The BASIN grid picks up directional spectra at 3-hourly intervals from OWI’s GROW database after the GROW spectra have been interpolated spatially to the BASIN grid points.
