High Resolution Ocean Surface Wave Hindcast (US Wave) Data

Abstract

The development of this dataset was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy and Water Power Technologies Office to improve our understanding of the U.S. wave energy resource and to provide critical information for wave energy project development and wave energy converter (WEC) conceptual design. This will be the highest resolution publicly available long-term wave hindcast dataset that, when complete, covers the entire U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). As such, it could be of value to any company with marine operations inside the U.S. EEZ. Specifically, the data can be used to investigate the historical record of wave statistics at any U.S. site. This level of detail could be of interest to the Oil and Gas industry for offshore platform engineering, to the offshore wind industry for turbine and array design, to offshore aquaculture production and blue economy development, to coastal communities for extreme hazards mitigation, to global shipping companies and fishermen for a better understanding of weather windows and seasonal wave climate patterns at a spatial resolution that does not exist elsewhere. The NREL Offshore Wind group has expressed significant interest in this dataset for device structural modeling, array design, and economic modeling.