Atlas of Tropical Cyclone Waves in the Great Barrier Reef |
The Cooperative Research Centre for the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (CRC GBRWHA) funded the development of a tropical cyclone wave atlas for the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. The atlas provides a high resolution of wave data for many purposes including design wave loads for the design of reef structures and coral damage assessments.
The population of tropical cyclone waves that affect the Great Barrier Reef region has been modelled using a database of synthetic cyclones developed in-house and a in-house modified wave model based on WAM Cycle 4. The outcome of this modelling is an atlas of tropical cyclone waves for the Great Barrier Reef region. Preliminary access to the data is available here from the links above. The results were developed by modelling 6000 synthetic cyclones using a parametric 2-D cyclone wind field model as forcing for the WAMGBR wave model. A set of nested grids were used; one grid with a 20 nm resolution, three nested grids with a 4 nm resolution and 15 fine grids with a 0.8 nm resolution. This provides more than 150 000 grid points for which statistical tropical cyclone wave data are available (i.e. every 1.5 kilometres). This was a huge task requiring more than 6 months of time on a variety of computers ranging from the university supercomputer to Digital Alphas down to Linux based PC's. The enormity of the data generated has required the development of a digital based access method, which is presently being developed.
| MMU HOME |