Abstract Accurate wind‐wave simulations are vital for evaluating the impact of waves on coastal dynamics, especially when wave observations are sparse. It has been demonstrated that structured‐grid models have the ability to capture the wave dynamics of large‐scale offshore domains, and the recent emergence of unstructured meshes provides an opportunity to better simulate shallow‐water waves by resolving the complex geometry along islands and coastlines. For this study, wind waves in Lake Michigan were simulated u…