Impact of Rapidly Evolving SST fields during Coastal Upwelling Events on Offshore Wind Power Production

With the offshore wind industry on the horizon in the US, there is a growing need to improve our understanding of the offshore environment. Therefore, studying the interaction of ocean and atmospheric processes will help to advance current weather and forecasting models for the successful operation of offshore wind farms. Specifically, in the Mid Atlantic, events like coastal upwelling have shown to have major impacts on wind resources by altering sea breeze events- in timing, intensity and extent (Seroka et al. 2018). Bottom cold water is upwelled to the surface along the New Jersey coast, creating a higher thermal contrast between the land and ocean. These events have a large spatial extent and occur during periods of peak energy demand in the summer. Current weather models are limited by the input sea surface temperature (SST) fields which contain daily static images, often missing recent measurements due to cloud coverage. In this study we use the new geostationary satellite (GOES-16), which contains hourly SST composites, to determine the importance of high resolution, rapidly evolving SST on wind speeds at turbine hub height. The use of evolving SST during upwelling events is vital in accurately predicting conditions for offshore wind resource assessment.