Projeto Azul

Operational wind forecast over the offshore Campos basin and adjacent coastal region in Brazil: support for the oil and gas industry toward renewable energy transition

“…At the national level, oil and gas are produced in greater quantities in the state of Rio de Janeiro, extracted from the Campos and Santos basins (ANP 2022). In the Campos Basin, offshore oil and gas extraction operations began in the late 1970s (dos Santos et al 2015), and about 55% of xed oil platforms reached or exceeded the maturity of their useful life (Albuquerque et al 2020). An interesting alternative to decommissioning these platforms is their use in wind power generation (Albuquerque et al 2020; Barboza et al 2020;Braga et al 2022).…”

“…One of these projects is the Santos Basin Ocean Observing System, also known as Project Azul. The project started in 2012 and the main goal was to develop an oceanic observation system for the Santos basin, based on the acquisition of real-time oceanographic data and numerical modeling (Franz et al 2021;dos Santos et al 2015). Project Azul's bene ts are not restricted to oil and gas activities; the results generated allowed for a better knowledge of the features of the ocean on a regional scale and can contribute to a variety of research projects, including those related to ocean climate and renewable energy (Franz et al 2021).…”

“…Since wind is one of the atmospheric components that most in uence ocean dynamics, in the context of Project Azul, the numerical weather prediction model Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) (Skamarock et al 2019) was implemented in a daily operational regime to provide meteorological forecasts to compose the boundary conditions of regional ocean models, covering the entire Southeast Region of Brazil (dos Santos et al 2015). Given the above information, the present work has the general objective of evaluating the performance of the WRF model regarding the predictability and space-time representation of the near-surface winds in the Campos Basin and adjacent coastal region, based on the evaluation of the numerical results against onshore and offshore meteorological data.…”