Downscaling wave energy resources to coastal areas

Ocean wave reanalysis databases need to be downscaled to increase the spatial resolution and simulate the wave transformation process in order to obtain wave energy resources in shallow waters. A hybrid downscaling methodology to transfer wave energy resources to coastal areas is proposed combining a numerical wave model (dynamical downscaling) with mathematical tools (statistical downscaling). A maximum dissimilarity selection algorithm (MDA) is applied in order to obtain a representative subset of wave and wind conditions in deep water areas. These selected situations are propagated using a state-of-the-art wave propagation model. The time series of the propagated wave power at a particular location are reconstructed using a non-linear interpolation technique based on radial basis functions (RBFs), providing excellent results in a high dimensional space with scattered data as occurs in the cases selected with MDA. The validation of the results using buoy data confirms the ability of the developed methodology to reconstruct wave energy resources in shallow water at a particular location and to estimate spatial wave power with a considerable reduction in the computational effort.