The Bureau of Meteorology is Australia's national agency responsible for warning mariners, industry and the community of dangerous or damaging waves affecting people and structures along the Australian coastline and high seas.  The Bureau's warning services to the community rely on wave modelling capabilities.

The Australian wave model (AUSWAVE), based on the third-generation wind wave modelling framework WAVEWATCH III® (WW3) model has been the operational sea-state model run by the Bureau National Operations Centre since August 2010. The AUSWAVE system is forced by the Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system.  The operational wave models run at three different domains: global model at 25km resolution and regional model at 10km resolution and the North West shelf of Western Australia at 4km resolution.

This presentation covers the operational need to have different wave model configurations and more importantly, wave forecast validation is performed using conventional buoy data and satellite altimetry with focus on extreme conditions such as tropical cyclones. This study shows higher resolution wave model driven by more accurate surface wind fields generally performs the best over the Australian domain