Ocean Dynamics (2015) 65:1275–1288 DOI 10.1007/s10236-015-0873-3 Observation of wind-waves from a moored buoy in the Southern Ocean Henrique Rapizo 1 · Alexander V. Babanin 1 · Eric Schulz 2 · Mark A. Hemer 3 · Tom H. Durrant 4 Received: 3 July 2015 / Accepted: 26 August 2015 / Published online: 11 September 2015 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Abstract The Southern Ocean is an important component in the global wave climate. However, owing to a lack of observations, our understanding of waves is poor compared to other regions. The Southern Ocean Flux Station (SOFS) has been deployed to fill this gap and represents the first successful moored air-sea flux station at these southern hemisphere latitudes. In this paper, we present for the first time the results from the analysis of the wave measurements, focused on statistics and extremes of the main wave param- eters. Furthermore, a spectral characterization is performed regarding the number of wave systems and predominance of swell/wind-sea. Our results indicate a high consistency in terms of wave parameters for all deployments. The max- imum significant wave height obtained in the 705 days of observation was 13.41 m. The main spectra found represent unimodal swell dominated cases; however, the dimension- less energy plotted against dimensionless peak frequency for these spectra follows a well-known relation for wind-sea conditions. In addition, the Centre for Australian Weather Responsible Editor: Bruno Castelle  Henrique Rapizo hrapizo@swin.edu.au 1 Centre for Ocean Engineering, Science and Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Melbourne, Victoria 3122, Australia 2 Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3 CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia 4 MetOcean Solutions, Raglan, New Zealand and Climate Research wave hindcast is validated with the SOFS data. Keywords Wind-generated waves · Wave parameters · Wave spectrum · Spectral partitioning · Wave hindcast 1 Introduction The Southern Ocean (SO) is the southern-most part of the global ocean and represents around 22 % of the sea sur- face area. This region is known to play an important role in the climate system, cycling heat, carbon, and nutrients (e.g., Orsi et al. 1999). Waves modulate the air-sea fluxes (Badulin et al. 2007) and exchanged properties are redis- tributed primarily via the Antarctic Circumpolar Cur- rent (Rintoul and Sokolov 2001). Additionally, the high latitude and absence of land barriers allow strong winds to blow over practically unlimited fetches, creating ideal con- ditions for severe wave generation. The waves generated in this region have far reaching effects, contributing signifi- cantly to the wave climate in all the major ocean basins (Alves 2006). Our interest in the Southern Ocean is from an air-sea interaction perspective, recognizing that wave development under strong wind forcing is likely to be different from mod- erate conditions (Powell et al. 2003; Donelan et al. 2006). The effects of waves on the lower atmosphere and momen- tum exchange in the air-sea boundary layer are modulated by the surface wave characteristics (e.g., Badulin et al. 2007); however, this complex coupled system is still poorly understood and highly parameterized. The long fetches and the relative constant high wind speed make the SO an interesting area to study wave evolution under extreme weather.