Wave climate on the southwestern coast of Lake Michigan: Perspectives from wave directionality

TL;DR

This study analyzes wave directionality along Lake Michigan's southwestern coast from 1979 to 2023, revealing bi-directional wave patterns, seasonal variations, and implications for coastal management and infrastructure design.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of wave directionality using the DWE method, highlighting bi-directionality, seasonal trends, and spatial variations specific to Lake Michigan's coast.

Findings

Bi-directional wave climate with dominant northern and southern directions.

Seasonal increase in bi-directionality during summer and winter.

Northern wave heights are significantly greater than southern wave heights.

Abstract

Wave directionality plays a critical role in shaping coastal conditions and influencing local livelihoods, underscoring the importance of conducting detailed analyses. This study examines directional wave climate along the southwestern coast of Lake Michigan from 1979 to 2023 using the Directional Wave Entropy (DWE). Directionality was characterized in terms of inter-annual trends, monthly patterns, spatial variation, and extreme wave conditions. Overall, results exhibited a strong bi-directionality, with dominant northern and southern wave systems along the coast of our study site. A few annual trends for the inter-annual wave climate were observed, and there is a clear seasonal variation such that bi-directionality increases in the summer and winter seasons. As for spatial variation of wave directionality, all locations in the study sites presented a bi-directional wave climate. The two dominant directions of wave directionality: northern and southern mean significant wave heights were also characterized in all locations of study sites as 0.566 and 0.563 meters. Furthermore, the extreme wave heights in the northern direction are significantly greater than the extreme waves in the southern direction. In summary, these findings suggest the importance of wave directionality on coastal structural design and coastal morphology management along the coast of our study site.