The evolution of storms on the Wadden Sea

This report presents a standard storm profile, giving a description of the typical temporal variations of wind speed and direction during teh evolution of a storm. This model storm profile can be applied in a new setup of WAQUA and SWAN simulations for the Wadden Sea in WTI2011. In addition to this, a preliminary study by means of correlation analysis and multivariate regression is performed to obtain a first indication of the linear relations between the surge levels in the Wadden Sea and a number of meteorological variables, such a wind speed, wind direction, air pressure and temperature. This analysis is preliminary to the development of a new type of probabilistic model for storm surges in the Wadden Sea, which resolve a number of limitations of the current Hydra-K model./ The results of the correlation analysis show that high surges at Harlingen are mildly correlated with wind speed. Several other weather conditions (cloud cover, temperature, wind direction) show weak correlations, but the dependencies are not very pronounced and could be coincidental. Further studies to investigate the underlyin relationshop and dependencies between surge and weather conditions are necessary before the development of a new probabilistic model is started.