Wind–wave characterization and modeling in the Azores Archipelago

Wind–wave characterization and modeling around a group of islands can have significant challenges due to strong diffraction, shoaling, and reflection. In this work, the wind–wave climate of the Azores archipelago (North Atlantic Ocean) is characterized based on wave buoy measurements recorded between 2012 and 2021 at five different locations with water depth ranging from 80 to 110 m. Moreover, wave measurements during four storms of extratropical origin and two storms of tropical origin are analyzed in detail. Due to identified island shadow effects, the average significant wave height (Hs) ranged between 1.50 m (S. Miguel island) and 1.86 m (Graciosa island) in the south and north of the archipelago, respectively. Under storm conditions, shadow effects can lead to differences up to approximately 7 m in Hs between the north and south of the archipelago. The ability to simulate the local wave conditions by an unstructured WAVEWATCH III model covering the north Atlantic with high resolution around the Azores Archipelago is analyzed. In addition, the model performance and scalability on two different High Performance Computing environments are analyzed considering different numerical schemes and parallelization algorithms.