ИСТИНА

In order to improve conventional climatologies of wind wave characteristics derived from the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) data and from satellite altimetry (ESA GLOBWAVE, http://globwave.org) we use a recently proposed theoretical concept exploiting dependencies of wave height on the wave periods and self-similarity of wind forced surface waves as indicators of wind-sea coupling. While the climatologies of significant wave height and dominant period based on the observations from VOS and satellite data demonstrate qualitative consistency, quantitative differences are quite evident for the collocated satellite and VOS observations. These differences cannot be explained to a full extent by the uncertainties in visual wave observations with considerable part of the uncertainties being due to biases in satellite data mostly associated with the pre-processing of raw measurements. Our framework allows for the adjustment of power-law dependencies of significant wave heights on the period for both VOS and satellite data by accounting for the effect of interaction of wind-driven seas and swell on global scales. This adjustment allows for the correction of the conventional climatologies and provides new global gridded products with accurate discrimination of seas and swells. We will present these products and discuss their potential applications for wave climate studies. Comparative assessments will be presented on global scale as well as for selected well sampled regions in the Northwest Atlantic and south of Australia characterized by different wind sea and swell characteristics.