Abstract:
The study presents a reconstruction of the Western Black Sea wave climate based on a numerical hindcast using the SWAN wave model and ERA5 input data. While there are many wave hindcasts reconstructing the Black Sea wave climate, based on various atmospheric reanalysis projects, the present work is the first based on the state of art ERA5 reanalysis. We focus on the storminess affecting the Bulgarian coast. The storminess in the recent decade (2010-2019) was found to be the highest compared to the previous 3 decades covered by the reanalysis (while the previous 2000-2009 is with the lowest), but the trends in the storm proxies used in the study are not statistically significant. This confirms the conclusions of other studies that the wave climate of the Western Black Sea is steady.