This article is part of the special series "The Future of Marine Environmental Monitoring and Planning." The series will take a sneak peek into the future of marine monitoring where integration of new monitoring technologies with advanced ecosystem modeling will make it possible to estimate real-time ecosystem status, improve model precision, and provide a robust basis for marine environmental assessments.
Offshore wind farms around the world are being developed with the objective of increasing the contribution of renewable energy to the global energy consumption. Bathymetric features at the wind farm sites have a strong influence on waves and currents, controlling the propagation and dissipation of flows during normal and extreme conditions. In this work we use a state-of-the-art cost-effective method for bathymetric mapping based on high resolution satellite images to characterize a coastal wind farm region and assess the added value of such data when performing wave modelling. The study area is characterized by the presence of offshore wind farms and a complex bathymetry that feature sand bars and channels. For this study, a satellite derived bathymetry (SDB) was produced using imagery from the Sentinel-2A satellite. The Sentinel-2a data allows for more detailed SDB retrieval than is available in the existing accessible bathymetric datasets. The data is then used in a spectral wave model (MIKE21SW) with different resolutions outlining the impact of large bedforms on surface waves, mainly due to wave breaking. The bathymetry data is also used in a phase-resolving model (MIKE3waveFM) where regular and irregular waves are simulated, outlining the impact of bedforms on individual wave dissipation. Discussion on the satellite derived bathymetry and wave models results are presented in this paper.
Using the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) global high-resolution elevation measurements, it is possible to distinguish individual surface ocean waves. With the vast majority of ocean surveying missions using radar satellites, ICESat-2 observations are an important addition to ocean surveys. ICESat-2 can also provide additional observations not possible with radar. In this paper, we consolidate the ICESat-2 ocean observations by comparing the significant wave height (SWH) with coincident CryoSat-2 radar observations during the CRYO2ICE campaign from August 2020 to August 2021. We use 136 orbit segments, constrained to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans as well as the Bering Sea, to compare observations to show the level of agreement between these systems. Three models based on ICESat-2 are used in the comparison: the standard ocean data output (ATL12), a method of modeling the individual surface waves using the geolocated photons and, functioning as a baseline, an approach using the standard deviation of the ocean surface. We find the following correlations between the SWHs from the models and the SWHs from CryoSat-2: 0.97 for ATL12, 0.95 for the observed waves model, and 0.97 for the standard deviation model. In the same comparison, we find mean differences relative to the observed SWHs for each model, as well as errors, which increase as the SWH increases. The SWH observed from ICESat-2 is found to agree with observations from CryoSat-2, with limitations due to changes in the sea state between the satellite observations. Observing the individual surface waves from ICESat-2 can therefore provide additional observed properties of the sea state that can be used alongside other global observations.
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