An Improved Method to Calculate Principal Wave Direction from Buoy Data

In this paper, Obtaining the principal wave direction from azimuth, pitch and roll data recorded by a wave buoy is investigated. However, the existing method still exists many limitations. In order to improve the accuracy of the principal wave direction measurement by a wave buoy, an improved method is proposed. The new method can use the selection method to deal with the counting proportions, and the selected counting proportions are used as the weight for vector average processing to calculate the principal wave direction. The data acquired from Pingtan Test Base in Fujian Province were used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results confirm that the improved method is not only effective in practice, but also has a high coincidence with WAVEX, and is better than the existing method in accuracy.