Two events will be presented which

Two events will be presented which show the capability of WaveAna to analyze the measured displacement of a floating buoy. During the first event shown in Fig. 2, WaveAna plots the estimated directional spectrum every 3 h.The time at which the spectra are calculated increases from left to right and from top to bottom. Table 1 shows the calculated significant wave height, main frequency and main direction of the two waves as estimated from WaveAna.At the beginning there is a weak wind field which causes WaveAna to produce a wide angular spread of the spectrum.During the second and third spectrum, it seems that a new wave is generated at 230◦ while there is another one wave field at 360◦. The high frequency of the second wave field (see Table 1) leads us to the conclusion that this wave field is more likely noise than wind generated wave. In the third spectrum it is clearly seen that the wind generated wave at 230◦ dominates. Later, during the fourth, fifth and sixth spectrum, the frequency of the first wave at 230◦ decreases. This behavior is related to a traveling wave rather than to a wind generated one. At the same time, a new wave is generated at 360◦ as can be seen both from the wave height and the frequency. Finally, the new wave at 360◦ dominates the spectrum. During this event, the evolution of the wind field as measured by the floating buoy is fully correlated with the generation of the waves, while the contribution of the traveling wave during the last three spectra is more than 20% of the total wave height. This contribution is important in wave height prediction efforts based on the existing wind.