NASA releases offshore wind data

NASA is publishing eight years of satellite data that it hopes will help support new offshore wind power projects.

The data details wind power density across the oceans, and could help commercial wind power projects harvest energy more effectively from offshore wind farms.

Writing in an article for the American Geophysical Union’s Geographical Research Letters Timothy Liu, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, claimed that the data would have additional benefits besides helping firms identify the best locations for offshore wind farms. " There is more of a focus on the energy production side," he wrote. "But there are also other applications in areas like climate change and the exchange of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases."

To date, most ocean wind speed measurements have relied on stationary buoys and shipping routes, which gives an incomplete picture of the environment. The data, from NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite, has been collected since its 1999 launch, and enough sampling time has now elapsed to produce statistically useful results, according to Liu.

Offshore wind projects have grown in popularity in recent years, partly because the uninterrupted flatness of the ocean makes wind flows more reliable and partly because of government support for projects that tend to attract less public opposition than onshore farms. The UK government for example, has committed itself to a target of generating up to 33GW of energy from offshore wind, enough to power all the homes in the UK.

New wind turbine technologies are also helping to bolster interest in offshore sites, according to Amardeeb Dhanju, a research assistant at the offshore wind power research group in the college of marine and earth studies at the University of Delaware. He explained that most offshore wind projects today use stationary turbines anchored to the sea floor, which limits their position to ocean depths of around 30m. However, oil and gas company StatoilHydro is working on a floating design that could be anchored to the sea bed at depths of 120m to 700m. The pilot project will be positioned 10km of the Norweigan coast.