Spatiotemporal analysis of NORA10 data of significant wave height

This paper presents a spatiotemporal analysis performed by applying a Bayesian hierarchical model on NORA10 data of significant wave height. The model has previously been applied to corrected ERA-40 data of significant wave height and was generally found to perform well. However, a new set of high-resolution significant wave height data has recently become available, which is believed to be an improvement compared to the C-ERA-40 data, and a similar spatiotemporal analysis is performed on this new data set. NORA10 differs from C-ERA-40 in various ways and in particular the spatial resolution is significantly increased. Hence, one main motivation for the study presented in this paper is to investigate how the model performs on data with very high spatial resolution. In particular, the model contains a separate component for identifying long-term trends in the wave climate, possibly due to climate change. For the C-ERA-40 data, significant increasing trends were detected in the selected area in the North Atlantic Ocean. These trends are not reproduced in the NORA10 data, but there are differences in geographical and temporal coverage that may, at least partly, explain such differences. The new analysis and the results pertaining to the NORA10 data are presented in this paper.