Effects of wind and wave forcing on modeling waves and tides in the Irish Sea

Waves, tides and tidal surge will have significant contributions to the water levels in the nearshore areas and along coastline, which in turn are the main causes for coastal flooding and erosion, particularly under the storm conditions. Therefore, predicting accurately the wave heights and the sea levels affected by waves, tides and storm surge becomes essential for the assessment and quantification of the risk from coastal flood and erosion. However, this will require an advanced and integrated modeling system to include major and important meteorological, oceanic, coastal and nearshore processes at different scales, as well as their interactions. As part of recently NERC-funded project EPIRUS, POLCOMS – a mesoscale tide and surge model and COAST2D – a coastal zone process model are combined to provide down-scaled and detailed regional parameters of tides, waves and surge from the meteorological inputs. This paper presents the preliminary results from POLCOMS coupled with the ProWAM model set for the Irish Sea, with a special focus on assessing the effects of wave and wind forcing between the nested domains.