One of the more prominent attempts has been provided by the
WASA Group (Günther et al., 1998) in order to verify hypotheses of a
worsening wind and wave climate in the North East North Atlantic.
The wind and wave data set generated by this group has proven to be
extremely useful, often being the only source of information available
for wave climate and impact studies. For coastal applications, however,
this data set still has some limitations. In particular, the wind
data, which were used to produce the wave hindcast, suffered from
some inhomogeneities along the reconstruction period such as
changes in the analysis system or the migration from manual to
automatic analyses (Günther et al., 1998). In addition, considering
coastal applications the spatial and temporal resolution of the provided
wind and wave data is relatively coarse. For example, for the
wave hindcast the spatial resolution is about 0.5°×0.75° and the data
were stored every 6 h.