SARAL-AltiKa Wind and Significant Wave Height for Offshore Wind Energy Applications in the New England Region

Abstract

The SARAL-AltiKa dataset was evaluated for refined offshore wind energy resources assessment and potential metocean monitoring capability in the Southern New England region. Surface wind speed and Significant Wave Height (Hs) products were assessed with corresponding variables from buoy observations for 2014–2019. To increase the sample size, this study analyzed and applied an approach to collect data around the reference buoys beyond the satellite footprint at the expense of a bias increment. The study corroborated the accuracy of the SARAL-AltiKa measurements for the offshore area of interest and added details for stations closer to the coast compared with past studies. A proportional bias with underestimation of high values of Hs was found in coastal sites. Wind speed estimates on the other hand appear to be less sensitive to the closeness to the coast. The empirical relationship between wind strength and Hs in the buoy observations is reproduced to a large extent by the AltiKa measurements in locations where land contamination is minimal. The histograms of surface wind and Hs are well described by the Weibull distribution and the shape and scale parameters closely resemble those of the histograms of the collocated in situ observations. We use these results to extrapolate the winds to a target domain with no in situ observations for wind energy resource estimation.