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

Metadata Updated: January 20, 2025

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.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: Creative Commons Attribution

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Dates

Metadata Created Date January 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from OpenEI data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date January 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date January 20, 2025
Publisher National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Maintainer
Identifier https://data.openei.org/submissions/8289
Data First Published 2024-08-02T21:14:57Z
Data Last Modified 2025-01-16T17:55:46Z
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 019:20
Metadata Context https://openei.org/data.json
Metadata Catalog ID https://openei.org/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Data Quality True
Datagov Dedupe Retained 20250120171954
Harvest Object Id a77d63ec-1d94-4024-965a-8ba9c27fb52b
Harvest Source Id 7cbf9085-0290-4e9f-bec1-91653baeddfd
Harvest Source Title OpenEI data.json
Homepage URL https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/241
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Program Code 019:009, 019:010
Projectnumber BIL.1.4.3.403
Projecttitle Floating Wind Array Design
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 36f32859c14c1c4bdf04383c557d7baaaa83d3c6c19c1f739920ce6e99c27f54
Source Schema Version 1.1

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