Birgitte Furevik: A forecasting service for Trondheim ship lane

In order to secure the safety of ships travelling along the Norwegian coast, several fine-scale wave models have been applied for the most dangerous wave areas, such as the Steady State Irregular Wave Model (STwave) and a refraction model (www.met.no: kyst_og_hav). Lately, the model Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) from TUDelft, The Netherlands, was employed to forecast waves in Trondheim ship lane. SWAN is a spectral wave model, similar to WAM, developed for shallow water or coastal areas by including depth-induced wave breaking, triad wave-wave interaction and an implicit numerical scheme that allows SWAN to run efficiently on high horizontal resolution. At met.no, SWAN was set up with 418x150 grid points and a 500mx500m grid cell size. It receives spectra on the outer boundaries from met.no's operational version of WAM and is driven by winds from a 4 km x 4 km atmospheric model. The model has furthermore the option to include varying current fields (refraction, blocking, and frequency shift) which we would like to test. Current fields can be obtained from an ocean or tidal model. We will present our experience with SWAN and results so far of comparing the forecasted wave parameters with those from a buoy located at Stor-Fosna in the ship lane. Acknowledgements: The work is performed in collaboration with the Norwegian Coastal Authorities (Kystverket).