Conclusions
The results of my study are somewhat inconclusive. I have shown that STWAVE can do a good job of modeling wave propagation throughout a harbor. However, it is safe to say STWAVE struggled when modeling the northern section of the breakwater system. I believe some of the problems arose from the relatively simplistic nature of my analysis. STWAVE has the ability to analyze a far greater number of parameters than I inputted. The creation of a more complete model using refraction, current, tides, etc. should more accurately represent harbor conditions. The biggest problem with STWAVE is its inability to model overtopping on breakwaters. Once a wave hits the breakwater in STWAVE, it stops. This is an obvious problem when 6 meter waves come in contact with 2 meter breakwaters, as would occur during a 20 or 50 year storm in the Chicago Harbor. More problems may be due to lack of data and time. The contour map I obtained from the U.S. Army Corp had 10s of thousands of data points, but I only used 7 or 8 thousand because of the tedious nature of the data entry. One other note, the contour map did not include Monroe Harbor, nor did it include data more than ½ mile from the breakwater. If this information can be obtained and properly modeled, the accuracy of my STWAVE models should increase .
STWAVE is a very powerful program, and while I believe it has the capability to better predict wave propagation throughout Chicago Harbor, precise and accurate results may be hard to obtain because of the overtopping limitation. Now that I am familiar with the program, it would be easier to create and analyze future models. The next step in the analysis would be to obtain new simulation data from the U.S. Army Corp, and to rework the computational domain of the harbor in STWAVE. This, accompanied with more extensive wave models, should create a more accurate simulation of the Chicago Harbor and help predict the impact of large storms on the surrounding breakwaters.