Summary:
Accurate estimation of wind and wave conditions is an essential information resource
for ship routing, coastal engineering, and several other coastal activities. The developing
offshore wind energy industry needs these estimations for prospecting and ensuring the
optimal siting of wind farms. Wind farms’ construction, operation, and decommission need real-time monitoring of wind and waves for decision making. Additionally, special attention to extremes and transient events must be paid for the aforementioned applications since they have the most considerable impact and must be well captured in numerical models. While a sprawl of data from various remote sensing capabilities, including the next generation of satellite altimeter data, is growing, their use is more effective when combined with traditional, longer-record, in situ observations from buoys, which serve as ground truth reference. This study focuses on the independent use of the two data sources and properly combining them so that the final analysis is physically consistent. Statistical analysis and optimal interpolation, merging multiple sensor’s data, are performed to improve the offshore marine conditions’ estimations and to identify dominant mesoscale and local mechanisms that contribute to their variability. The scope of this research is focused on the observations taken on the Southern New England region in the United States, where new offshore wind energy developments are taking place.
Keywords:
in situ observations, satellite altimetry, offshore wind energy, New England region, wind and significant wave height
