Reference Site Condition Datasets for Floating Wind Arrays in the United States

Floating offshore wind farm design is highly site-specific, requiring detailed information about the specific conditions of a project area for realistic design studies. Unfortunately, publicly available site condition data for potential floating offshore wind project sites in the United States is scarce. To support U.S. offshore wind research, we developed reference site condition datasets, including metocean and seabed information, for four potential floating wind project areas in the U.S.: Humboldt Bay, Morro Bay, the Gulf of Maine, and the Gulf of Mexico. These datasets were compiled using publicly available data.

Our metocean analysis, covering wind, waves, and surface currents, utilized measurement data from 2000 to 2020. Sources included the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s National Offshore Wind Dataset for wind data, National Data Buoy Center buoys for wave data, and the High Frequency Radar Network for surface currents. These data were integrated into hourly time series used to compute extreme return periods up to 500 years, monthly statistics, and joint probability clusters for fatigue analysis. Soil conditions were evaluated using the usSEABED database and bathymetry grids were interpolated from the NCEI Digital Elevation Model Global Mosaic.

Further information on the datasets and how they were created can be found in:

Biglu, Michael, Matthew Hall, Ericka Lozon, and Stein Housner. 2024. Reference Site Conditions for Floating Wind Arrays in the United States. Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL/TP-5000-89897. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/89897.pdf

The data are also available at: https://github.com/FloatingArrayDesign/SiteConditions

The content of each dataset is as follows:
_NOW23_wind.txt: Hourly NOW-23 wind data up to a height of 400 meter.
_metocean_1hr.txt: Hourly time series including wind, wave, surface current and temperature data.
_Summary.xlsx: Metocean data, including extreme values, joint probability distributions and monthly statistics.
_usSEABED_soil.csv: Extract of the usSEABED database for this specific site.
_bathymetry_200m.txt (and 500m, 1000m): Gridded seabed depth data.