ИСТИНА

Authors: Miaohua Mao et al. Key words: wind waves, modeling, SWAN, unstructured mesh Accurate wind-wave simulations are vital for evaluating the impact of waves on coastal dynamics, especially when wave observations are sparse. An unstructured mesh provides an opportunity to better simulate shallow-water waves by resolving the natural coastlines. Wind waves in Lake Michigan were simulated using the unstructured-grid version of SWAN model with various types of wind forcing, Sensitivity experiments were conducted to investigate the key factors that impact wave growth and dissipation processes. The results indicate that using GEM wind field data as input captures large waves in the midlake most accurately, while using the Natural Neighbor Method wind field reproduces shallow-water waves more accurately.