Development of a Suite of Benchmark Tests for Oceanic and Coastal Wave Models

Abstract : The primary goal of this project is to develop, on the basis of the present SWAN benchmark suite, a first version of a generic community suite covering both oceanic (unsteady state) time-dependent) and coastal (steady state) conditions. This will provide the basis for a suite that will qualitatively and quantitatively compare the computational results of any wave model of the spectral type with objective data from theoretical sources (analytical solutions) and empirical sources (laboratory and field observations). The suite will be generic in the sense that a) a diversity of wave models can be evaluated against such data and that b) an internationally agreed-upon fixed set of tests is used so that the score of different models can be intercompared. The suite is a community tool and will be provided to the international community to enable operational institutes and researchers around the world to test their wave models in a joint framework with common data and common score definitions.