The Water Research Laboratory (WRL) of the University of New South Wales has undertaken the first national assessment of the performance of the HI-WAM wave model developed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The model was validated against wave buoy measurements from 18 locations around Australia over an 11 year period 1 (1997 to 2008). This high resolution, modified version of WAM was found to generally reproduce the overall natural variability of the sea...