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WAVEWATCH IV (commonly abbreviated as WW4 TM) is a community wind wave modeling framework that includes the latest scientific advancements in the field of third-generation wind-wave modeling and dynamics. It is being developed as a software modernization project for WAVEWATCH III, and as such the next step in a nearly 4 decade journey of WAVEWATCH wind wave models. For a history of these models up to the present version III see Tolman (2026). For more info see the About WW4 page. For some technical information about the wiki page see the About the wiki page.
*** UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***
WW4 is still in the very early stages of development. A public repository and wiki portal have been started up at this stage of development to address Intellectual Property and Governance issues from the start, and to have a clean way to work with our core developers from the start. Phase I and II of this project are documented in Tolman (2025) and Tolman (2026), respectively. Check in to this portal regularly for the most recent updates.
*** UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***
Check the announcements section of the Discussions page for up to date information of the status of WW4.
To help you run WW4, we will provide a Quick Start Guide and a Documentation page as part of this wiki. These links will point to stub pages until the model is sufficiently mature for such pages to become relevant. Additional help can be obtained from the FAQ page, and from the broader community though our discussion page
Those who want to contribute to WW4 should start with familiarizing themselves with running the model (see the previous section of this page and its four links). After that, familiarize yourself with the Contributors Guide.
We are using the Github Discussions tool for this.
The authoritative repository for WAVEWATCH IV is located at NOAA-EMC/WW4. This repository only contains the “code stack” for WW4 and tools needed to test this code stack as a stand-alone wave model. It does not include full wave model applications, or more advanced tools for running the model. Once WW4 is sufficiently mature to build real world applications, we expect to start a second repository dedicated to applications.
The code managers for the main repository are Hendrik Tolman and Jessica Meixner.
There are no formal releases of WW4 yet. There are no intermediate model versions in the main branch of the repository yet. Once the first model versions are released, a list of releases will be maintained on the Releases page.
WW4 uses an ownership principle for contributions. In this context ownership refers to contributors to WW4 taking the responsibility for maintenance of the code they contribute. It does not refer to ownership in an (intellectual) property context. Read more on this in the Ownership page.
Documentation is developed in parallel with the code, and will be released with the first formal code releases of WW4.
