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Wave observations from an array of directional buoys over the southern Brazilian coast

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Abstract

It is well known that the majority of buoy measurements are located around the US coast and along some Europeans countries. The lack of long-term and densely spaced in situ measurements in the Southern Hemisphere in general, and the South Atlantic in particular, hinders several investigations due to the lack of detailed metocean information. Here, we present an effort to overcome this limitation, with a dense network of buoys along the Brazilian coast, equipped with several meteorological and oceanographic sensors. Out of ten currently operational buoys, three are employed to present the main characteristics of waves in the Southern part of the network. For the first time, sensor characteristics and settings are described, as well as the methods applied to the raw wave data. Statistics and distributions of wave parameters, swell propagating events, comparison with a numerical model and altimeters and a discussion about the occurrence of freak waves are presented.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Hydrographic Center of the Brazilian Navy (CHM). Alex V. Babanin acknowledges the grant 88881.062163/2014-01 from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) as a Special Visiting Researcher from the Brazilian Science Without Borders program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ocean Engineering Program, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Henrique Patricio Prado Pereira, Nelson Violante-Carvalho, Izabel Christina Martins Nogueira, Uggo Ferreira de Pinho, Fabio Nascimento & Carlos Eduardo Parente

  2. Department of Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Alexander Babanin & Qingxiang Liu

Authors
  1. Henrique Patricio Prado Pereira
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  2. Nelson Violante-Carvalho
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  3. Izabel Christina Martins Nogueira
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  4. Alexander Babanin
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  5. Qingxiang Liu
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  6. Uggo Ferreira de Pinho
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  7. Fabio Nascimento
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  8. Carlos Eduardo Parente
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Henrique Patricio Prado Pereira.

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Responsible Editor: Bruno Castelle

Appendices

Appendix A

Altimeter data

In this article, H m0 data from three altimeters, namely Jason-2, CryoSat-2 and HY-2, have been selected to inter-compare with buoy wave measurements. The original 1-Hz altimeter records were quality-controlled, calibrated and validated in Liu et al. (2016a). Calibrations of these wave data are summarized in the Table 6.

Table 6 Altimeter data and calibration used in Section 3.4 for the period over the five months from Feb to Jun 2012. The reader is referred to Table 3 of Liu et al. (2016a) for more details
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Pereira, H.P.P., Violante-Carvalho, N., Nogueira, I.C.M. et al. Wave observations from an array of directional buoys over the southern Brazilian coast. Ocean Dynamics 67, 1577–1591 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-017-1113-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-017-1113-9

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