ONLINE ATLAS OF UK MARINE RENEWABLE RESOURCES GOES LIVE
A project team led by ABP Marine Environmental Research (ABPmer) and including the providers of major marine-data holdings (Met Office and Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL)), has provided the marine-renewable industry with a new tool, an online, interactive webGIS version of the renowned UK Marine Renewable Energy Resources Atlas, with improved underlying resource datasets.
The online Atlas provides the most detailed data available for the regional description of potential marine-energy resources across UK waters, to aid the future deployment of renewable energy technologies – wind, wave and tidal.
The work was commissioned by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, as part of its Offshore Energy Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). It has given ABPmer the opportunity to update the UK Marine Renewable Energy Resources Atlas’s original resource datasets using the best source of wave, tide and offshore wind information presently available across the UK Continental Shelf.
The wind and wave datasets have been derived from an increased archive of data (from three-and-a-half years to seven years) made available by the Met Office, which has improved industry confidence in the representation of annual, seasonal and monthly statistical variations, as well as enabling assessment of inter-annual variability.
The tidal dataset made available by POL benefits from an enhanced physical description of turbulence, improved model calibration and a refined vertical resolution to enable differential descriptions between near-bed to mid-depth tidal streams.
Bill Cooper, Managing Director, ABPmer, said: “The original UK Marine Renewable Energy Resources Atlas, published in 2004, was a great success, attracting a major amount of interest throughout the sector. ABPmer is very pleased to be able to provide the industry with an online reference tool, as well as improved confidence through refined datasets. We are certain that this latest output, built with the needs of the industry in mind, will be every bit as useful as the original.”
Other outputs include pre-prepared Atlas maps in PDF format, a technical report and resource data layers (ArcGIS and MapInfo formats), which will all be available to download from www.renewables-atlas.info
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