Sea Surface Shape: Topological Feature Assimilation for Marine Energy Resource Assessment

The Earth’s oceans are an energetic and largely untapped potential source of electrical power generation. Significant engineering and logistical challenges have slowed the installation and utilization of marine energy converters. More accurate and better resolved energy resource availability maps are needed to discover economically viable marine energy sites and technologies. Existing ocean current resource assessments do not adequately characterize energy availability due to smaller and more transient (submesoscale) currents. Project Approach. Under this effort, newly available data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite mission will be used to perform high resolution analysis of sea surface heights and currents. These results will be used to build current energy availability maps that can be used to find feasible sites for marine energy conversion. Phase I Plan. Satellite altimetry data will be assimilated with model hindcasts of ocean dynamics. Because of the orbital characteristics of the satellite mission, terrestrial locations may have sampling periods of up to 21 days. Topological feature tracking will be used to infer the evolution of finer scale ocean currents between long and variable observational gaps. The resulting high resolution and time interpolated data product will be analyzed to produce high resolution ocean current resource assessment maps. Commercial Application and Other Benefits. In addition to de-risking and guiding investment in marine energy characterization, high resolution marine current data has other applications in the blue economy. For example, submesoscale currents are important in the vertical distribution of nutrients in the ocean and are therefore relevant for fisheries and ecosystem management. Also, fine scale surface current assessments can be used to provide improved routing for ocean shipping vessels.