NEXT
is Oceanweather's North Sea and Norwegian Sea long-term
metocean hindcast. It is an extension to the
original North Sea hindcast joint industry project
called NESS (Northern European Storm Study), which
was formed in 1986 by nine oil companies and two European
government agencies. All NEXT wave hindcasts were
made with Oceanweather's adaptation of a third-generation
wave model, namely OWI3G, on a nested grid system
consisting of a 150-km coarse grid and 30-km fine
grid.
The
hindcast consists of 3-hourly time series of "fields"
variables produced using winds from the NRA (NCEP
Reanalysis) hindcast and archived at 3,817 points
on the 30 km grid and hourly time histories of water
levels and total and residual currents at 6,995 grid
points as archived by the Danish Hydraulics Institute
from its rerun of its hydrodynamic model made during
NEXT.
The
spectra are archived at OWI for possible use in future
finer mesh hindcast studies or for access by NUG.
In
2010, a special ultrafine 1-km grid was setup in the
southwestern North Sea to increase skill in the specification
of storm driven sea states as they encountered the
thin shallow banks and dubbed SNEXT.
