Comparison of wave height between Triton, Buoy, and ECMWF

This study uses mobile buoys deployed in the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea, fixed buoys along the coast of Taiwan, and the atmospheric reanalysis database Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to verify and compare the wave heights retrieved from Triton. The results show that the first-fit line slopes of the comparison between Triton- retrieved wave heights and those observed by mobile and fixed buoys are 0.198 and 0.189, respectively, while that of the ECMWF ERA5 database is 0.24. The wave heights retrieved by Triton are overestimated compared to the in-situ buoy observations and the results provided by the ECMWF ERA5 database. The Central Weather Administration of Taiwan has developed high-resolution wave forecasting models, including deterministic and ensemble forecasts, and provides wave forecasts for the Blue Highway around Taiwan and its offshore islands. In the future, the wave heights retrieved by Triton will be used to validate the model forecast outputs and assess the feasibility of forecast bias correction.