The Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3 (WFIP3) is venturing into offshore wind energy exploration off the New England coast. The project seeks to address the complexities of forecasting offshore winds.
The project is deploying instruments across six land-based sites, with Argonne instrumentation at Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, Nantucket Island, and Rhode Island. A barge, equipped with instrumentation, will soon be moored in the waters where offshore wind turbines are being installed. The instrumentation will provide detailed metocean observations from the surface to the top of the boundary layer. These observations will be crucial in refining and validating forecast models, ultimately advancing the understanding of offshore wind energy resources. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Energy Technology Office, with the federal team including Argonne National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The non-federal partner team is led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and includes several university partners. The field study team is led by Paytsar Muradyan, atmospheric scientist, and includes Joe O’Brien, atmospheric science software specialist; Max Grover, atmospheric data scientist; and Bobby Jackson, atmospheric scientist. The PI on the project is Rao Kotamarthi, senior scientist.
