Wind–wave characterization and modeling in the Azores Archipelago

Wind–wave characterization and modeling around a group of islands can have significant challenges due to strong diffraction, shoaling, reflection. In this work, the wind–wave climate Azores archipelago (North Atlantic Ocean) is characterized based on wave buoy measurements recorded between 2012 2021 at five different locations with water depth ranging from 80 110 m. Moreover, during four storms extratropical origin two tropical are analyzed in detail. Due identified island shadow effects, average height (Hs) ranged 1.50 m (S. Miguel island) 1.86 (Graciosa south north archipelago, respectively. Under storm conditions, effects lead differences up approximately 7 Hs archipelago. The ability simulate local conditions by an unstructured WAVEWATCH III model covering high resolution Archipelago analyzed. addition, performance scalability High Performance Computing environments considering numerical schemes parallelization algorithms.