Lucia Pineau-Guillou

Thesis topic: Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction – Improvement of wind stress for coastal physical modelling

Advisors: Fabrice Ardhuin (director) and Marie-Noëlle Bouin (co-director)

Funding: Ifremer (started January 2016)

 Wind stress significantly influences modelling of oceanic processes such as waves, breakers, surges, surface/coastal circulation, upwellings and modelling of atmospheric processes. Large wave heights tend to be underestimated in wave models (Rascle & Ardhuin 2013, Hanafin et al. 2012), as well as storm surges in ocean models. This could be partly due to underestimated high wind speeds in atmospheric models, and inappropriate representation of wind stress in numerical models.

The objective is to define a more appropriate wind stress parameterization (i.e. generating values closer to observations), taking into account (1) the wave influence by moderate to strong winds and (2) the spray influence by very high winds.

Pineau-Guillou L., Ardhuin F., Bouin M.-N., Redelsperger J.-L., Chapron B., Bidlot J.-R., Quilfen Y. (2017). Strong winds in a coupled wave-atmosphere model during a North Atlantic storm event: evaluation against observations. Accepted in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.