Génération de bases de données océano-météorologiques pour l'élaboration de climatologies adaptées au dimensionnement des structures en mer

The number of Marine Renewable Energy projects has rapidly raised over the last decades. Those require a refined description of environmental conditions, such as sea states, for resource assessments as well as for the conception of the Marine Energy Converters. Engineering studies require long-term data sets so as to assess temporal variability and extreme events of sea states at the scale of the implantation sites.,As a support to its research studies on Marine Renewable Energy, Ifremer is building a specific hindcast database, running the wave model WAVEWATCH III® on an unstructured grid. The wave model extends over the area from the South of the North Sea to the Bay of Biscay with a high spatial resolution and covers a 16 years period from 1996 to 2012. The parameterization of the model is presented in this paper, as well as the forcing, the specific output data and validation results.