Purpose: This Coastal and Hydraulics Engineering Technical Note (CHETN) describes the design and implementation of a wave model evaluation system, altWIZ, which uses wave height observations from operational satellite radar altimeters. The altWIZ system utilizes two recently released altimeter databases: Ribal and Young (2019) and European Space Agency Sea State Climate Change Initiative v.1.1 level 2 (Dodet et al. 2020). The system facilitates model evaluation against 1 Hz1 altimeter data or a product created by averaging altimeter data in space and time around model grid points. The system allows, for the first time, quantitative analysis of spatial model errors within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Wave Information Study (WIS) 30+ year hindcast for coastal United States. The system is demonstrated on the WIS 2017 Atlantic hindcast, using a 1/2° basin scale grid and a 1/4° regional grid of the East Coast. Consistent spatial patterns of increased bias and root-mean-square-error are exposed. Seasonal strengthening and weakening of these spatial patterns are found, related to the seasonal variation of wave energy. Some model errors correspond to areas known for high currents, and thus wave-current interaction. In conjunction with the model comparison, additional functions for pairing altimeter measurements with buoy data and storm tracks have been built. Appendices give information on the code access (Appendix I), organization and files (Appendix II), example usage (Appendix III), and demonstrating options (Appendix IV).