Description:

Offshore wind energy development in the United States is accelerating, with projects currently representing 40 gigawatts of proposed installed capacity. The northern third of the Mid-Atlantic Bight is the home to three operational offshore wind farms within United States.  However, there are still substantial, unsolved challenges with forecasting winds and turbulence over the ocean. A key challenge to improving wind resource prediction within this region is to achieve a better understanding of the atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers and their interactions through the wave-mediated surface.

This session will focus on observations and modeling studies conducted to reduce the uncertainty of offshore wind forecasts. A special emphasis will be given to results from observational studies (particularly field experiments, like Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3), modeling studies focused on wind-wave-ocean coupling processes, model parametrization development or evaluation, advanced data assimilation methodologies, and AI-based techniques to quantify uncertainty of offshore weather forecasts.