On Correlation between Wind and Wave Storms

The paper is focused on the formulation of an adequate criterion for associating wave storm events to the generating wind storm ones, and on the study of correlation between their characteristic parameters. In this context, the sea storm definition commonly used for storm identification from significant wave height data is adapted for wind storm, by processing wind speed data. A sensitivity analysis is proposed as function of the storm thresholds aiming at identifying optimal combination of wind speed and significant wave height thresholds allowing the association of relatively large number of events ensuring high correlation between wind and wave storm parameters. The analysis is carried out using as input data wind speeds and significant wave heights from four meteorological (buoys and anemometers) stations of the National Data Buoy Center moored off the East Coast of the United States. Results reveal that an optimal threshold combination is achieved assuming both wind speed and significant wave height threshold as 1.5 time their respective averages.