https://eo4society.esa.int/projects/waposal/
The WAPOSAL project is producing an innovative application of Earth Observation data. WAPOSAL is creating a state-of-the-art database of wave renewable energy in European coastal zones, marginal territories like archipelagoes, Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea to support the EU Green Transition and make the climate neutral.
The new database will be openlly published in the CEOS catalog https://ceos.org/mim-database/. The WAPOSAL database contains coastal wave resource data at every 300 m for the regions of Figure 1 : Along-track wave power density data, along-track wave power density trend data, wave period, coefficients of variability at specific coastal sites, dataset on the average distribution of the seasonal and wave power density and data on the distribution of the wave power density trend per coastal zone.
The global coverage of the altimetry constellation, the provision of significant wave height measurements, and the capability to estimate wave periods demonstrate that satellite altimeters are valuable systems for assessing the site-specific wave energy potential. WAPOSAL uses a novel methodology to compute wave power density based on a newly produced EO dataset that enables high-resolution multi-mission altimetry data in the coastal zone.
Objectives:
- create a state-of-the-art dataset of average wave power density
- obtain along-track wave period estimates in European coastal zones
- obtain along-track wave power density estimates, its variability, and trends
Satellite altimetry missions have brought a new perspective and paved the way for renewable energy assessment from space. High-resolution SAR altimetry (Altimetry Virtual Lab-AVL) products from the ESA CryoSat-2, Sentinel-3 from the OCRE EO database, and Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich missions, processed with coastal zone algorithms such as SAMOSA+, offer a new opportunity to improve coastal wave energy assessments.
Significant wave height (Hs) and the backscatter coefficient (Sigma0) are directly derived from the OCRE-EO database distributed by the ESA AVL hosted on the EarthConsole® platform (https://earthconsole.eu/virtual-labs/).
Main achievements from WP1:
- The Gommenginger et al. (2003) method was successfully applied and improved to estimate the along-track wave periods needed for the estimation of the wave power density.
- The method shows a good correlation for both the significant wave height (Hs) and the wave period (Tz) in all WAPOSAL regions (Figure 1).
- CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3AB altimeter’s statistical metrics give similar results.
Main achievements from WP2:
- The along-track wave power density by coastal zone, the wave power density variability in the selected coastal site and the along-track wave power density and current comparison were assessed. The results show that there exist a high correlation between the ocean current magnitude and the wave power density (see section Results).