Case Study of a Short-Term Wave Energy Forecasting Scheme: North Indian Ocean

Short-term forecasts of wave energy play a key role in the daily operation, maintenance planning, and electrical grid operation of power farms. In this study, we propose a short-term wave energy forecast scheme and use the North Indian Ocean (NIO) as a case study. Compared with the traditional forecast scheme, our proposed scheme considers more forecast elements. In addition to the traditional short-term forecast factors related to wave energy (wave power, significant wave height (SWH), wave period), our scheme emphasizes the forecast of a series of key factors that are closely related to the effectiveness of the energy output, capture efficiency, and conversion efficiency. These factors include the available rate, total storage, effective storage, cooccurrence of wave power-wave direction, co-occurrence of the SWH-wave period, and the wave energy at key points. In the regional nesting of numerical simulations of wave energy in the NIO, the selection of the southern boundary is found to have a significant impact on the simulation precision, especially during periods of strong swell processes of the South Indian Ocean (SIO) westerly. During tropical cyclone 'VARDAH' in the NIO, as compared with the simulation precision obtained with no expansion of the southern boundary (scheme-1), when the southern boundary is extended to the tropical SIO (scheme-2), the improvement in simulation precision is significant, with an obvious increase in the correlation coefficient and decrease in error. In addition, the improvement is much more significant when the southern boundary extends to the SIO westerly (scheme-3). In the case of strong swell processes generated by the SIO westerly, the improvement obtained by scheme-3 is even more significant.

Automated summary

Short-term wave energy forecasts are crucial for daily operations, maintenance planning, and grid operations of power farms. A new short-term wave energy forecast scheme was proposed in this study, which considers additional forecast elements to improve accuracy. The selection of the southern boundary in numerical simulations of wave energy in the North Indian Ocean significantly impacts simulation precision, especially during strong swell processes of the South Indian Ocean westerly.