The study investigates extreme value analysis of wave climate around the Farasan islands’ protected coastal zone in the southern Red Sea. It provides an overall idea of the extreme wave conditions in the southern Red Sea, which are influenced by the Indian monsoon and local climates as well as by the effect of complex topography due to the presence of corals and high steepness in the bathymetry. The significant wave height return levels for the select shallow and deep regions around the Farasan islands are estimated using extreme value models; Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) and Generalized Pareto Distribution (GPD). The trend analysis shows that the trends of near extremes (90th and 95th percentile Hs) are significant in the offshore regions around the Farasan Islands, but not significant in the nearshore regions. The seasonal analysis indicates that the seasonal estimates of extreme Hs are more reliable than annual estimates, considering the differences in the seasonal wave generation mechanisms.
Numerical Modelling: A high-end desktop server (Apple Mac Pro 12-core) and the QU high-performance computing (HPC) clusters are utilized to implement high-performance numerical models of coupled marine-atmosphere-ecosystem, sediment and particle dynamics. State-of-the-art numerical models are employed to hindcast circulation, waves and tides in the Arabian Gulf and in the EEZ of Qatar. Long-term and short-term hindcasts are being carried out and analyzed to study the variability and climate change impacts. In addition, ESC provides R&D solutions to marine issues related to coastal developments in the country using numerical models coupled with observations.
Arabian Gulf circulation using SLIM: The Second-generation Louvain-la-Neuve Ice-ocean Model (SLIM, www.climate.be/slim) has been applied to simulate circulation in the Arabian Gulf. SLIM solves the equations governing geophysical, environmental and groundwater phenomena by means of the (discontinuous Galerkin) finite element method on 1D, 2D or 3D unstructured meshes. To take advantage of state-of-the-art developments, SLIM is also interfaced with existing tools (often based on radically different numerical methods), such as the well-known and widely used General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM, www.gotm.net).