INFORMING SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATIONAL DATA NEEDS WITH OBSERVATIONS IN AND AROUND OFFSHORE WIND ENERGY INSTALLATIONS

The requirement is put 2 buoys in the Vinyard Wind energy area and drifters to collect meteorological and oceanographic information. This requirement will augment existing Government-funded research to collect additional meteorological/atmospheric observations in and around planned wind farms areas. These observations are critical to understanding the changing conditions of winds and currents in a wind farm and to validate numerical forecast models used in the CG Search and Rescue Planning tool (SAROPS) for the drift of objects in the water. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute currently has a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded agreement to deploy a pair of oceanographic/ meteorological buoys and multiple drifters within the Vineyard Wind leased energy area (offshore of Massachusetts) as part of the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation (WTRIM) effort (grant award number NA20NOS0120219).

The NOAA funded buoys will be collecting winds, surface currents, and wave conditions in the wind farm area, which is critical data for the CG SAROPS drift model. This data will be used by NOAA to develop mitigation methods for coastal surface currents (HF) radars. Overlapping and augmenting the WTRIM effort will allow the CG access to a greater scope of data. WTRIM is funding the use of cameras that will measure the spin rate, blade glint/glare and shadow flicker data from the turbine movement, as well as determine mitigation or removal of signals from turbines that may interrupt current HF Radar infrastructure used in EDS. Augmenting current federally funded projects rather than starting from scratch can provide cost savings due to the CG having access to this additional data and WHOI’s ready inventory of configured buoy hardware, sensors, and software. Additional savings can be realized through cost sharing assets for deployment and retrieval.