Microseism recordings from four European broadband stations and from three seismic arrays in Scotland, Norway, and Germany are compared with model wave data of the oceanic wave field in the North Atlantic and local ocean wave data from the Norwegian coast at 60¿N, both measured during February--March 2000. Two approaches have been tested to locate generation areas of microseismic energy: a new amplitude correlation technique and beam backprojection from the three seismic arrays. Both techniques reveal that the main generation areas are located in specific regions off the coast of Southwest Norway and North Scotland. Seismic stations distant from these generation areas record a superposition of seismic energy from different source regions. Those close to a specific source region also show a high correlation with it. Both techniques give upper limits for the extent of the generation area of the strongest storm on 6/7 March at the southwest Norwegian coast of about 500 km. By using marine X-band radar measurements of the two-dimensional wave height spectrum, we estimate that the relative change of the extension of the generation area off the coast of southwest Norway during several storms is less than a factor of 3. This indicates that the size of the generation area is controlled by static features as coastline or bathymetry, and not by the extent of the storms. Microseism energy appears to be mainly controlled by the wave height in distinct and identifiable generation regions, so that the wave climate in these regions can be studied using historical records of microseisms.