Numerical Simulation for Typhoon and Wave of Qiongzhou Strait

Southern China has been subject to some of the deadliest typhoons in history with records going back over a thousand years. Before the large waves associated with a typhoon reach the mainland of China there is a delay between the typhoon reaching landfall and the time of the extreme waves arriving. This paper focuses on an approach to simulate this lag in the waves reaching landfall in the Qiongzhou Strait in southern China. A numerical approach has been adopted to simulate the typhoon and wave processes using a parametric typhoon model and the SWAN wave model. Two typhoon events are simulated (typhoon Kai-Tak in 2012 and typhoon Jebi in 2013) and used to tune the parameters for the numerical models. The simulated wind speeds and significant wave heights of the typhoon are compared with measured data. For the simulation of typhoon Kai-Tak, the correlation coefficient gives an 87% agreement between the simulated and measured values of wave height with a standard deviation of 0.29 m. For typhoon Jebi the fit is less good (66%). However, the simulation results have provided insight into improving the parametric typhoon model.