Remote Sensing of Small-Scale Storm Variations in Coastal Seas

Estimating extreme values of significant wave heights (SWH) is a necessity in many branches of coastal science and engineering. Storm intensity, however, is not a smooth varying quantity, but it oscillates with random variations around a generally regular trend; the estimated value of extreme sea states is, therefore, necessarily affected by the sampling time of the available data. This is especially important when making use of synthetic data deriving from weather and wave simulation systems, which artificially smoothen the SWH record history. Active remote sensing provides valuable help to overcome this problem: the work described here very briefly recalls the available satellite SWH and wind measurements and shows how such data may help clarify and reduce a possible cause of error in wave climate evaluation, and especially so along coastal areas.