WW3 is a major spectral wave modeling system known for its applicability
in large-scale modeling of sea states and wave climate from large
rectilinear grids offshore to high-resolution unstructured grids in
coastal zones, being widely used in operational, research and
engineering arenas. Over the past few years, the operational global
system at NCEP utilizes the multi-grid capabilities, where various
rectilinear grids are nested internally to represent the offshore domain
with a less computationally expensive coarse grid while the nearshore is
run at a high-resolution grids. Alternatively, a single unstructured
grid can be used for such applications. Recent advances in the
performance of the model on unstructured grids provide the opportunity
to run the model on large unstructured grids efficnetly. Here, an
assessment of the operational global setup and unstructured wave models
on various resolutions are given. The sensitivity to global unstructured
mesh design was investigated using triangular meshes with a global
minimum element size that ranged from 1.5 km to 6 km with local mesh
refinement in storm landfall location. The validation is performed
against satellite altimeter data and offshore NDBC network during normal
and stormy conditions. We demonstrate that an optimized unstructured WW3
can be used for global applications, with superior performance relative
to the complicated multi-grid system.