This project will involve the purchase and deployment of compact wave measuring datalogger in the vicinity of an offshore marine renewable array: the Gwynt y Môr wind farm in North Wales. Understanding the effect of large periodic arrays of offshore structures on the wave climate is important for environmental impact assessment, determining wave loading on the structures themselves, and will also facilitate the design and optimisation of heterogeneous offshore arrays for combined wind and wave energy extraction. Combined with publicly available displacement measurements from a nearby Datawell Waverider buoy, the collected data will produce direct empirical measurements of wave modulation, and will permit validation of numerical and analytic wave models incorporating offshore structures.
