Wave Power Density Prediction with Wind Conditions Using Deep Learning Methods

The uncertainty and enormous potential of wave energy have drawn attention and research efforts on predicting offshore wave behavior to aid wave energy harvesting. The movement of offshore waves generates huge amounts of available renewable energy and creates a unique offshore energy source. Because offshore waves are mainly generated by wind, this paper focused on using wind speed as the main factor to predict offshore wave power density to assist wave energy harvesting. The dynamic behaviors of wave energy were displayed in this paper in a format of wave power density distribution, which was extracted and visualized in MATLAB. The model was reconstruction based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network for one week and 3 h wave power density forecasting, integrated with wind conditions as input in two scenarios. One scenario explored the location effect for wave density forecasting. Another scenario compared the influence of different time series input of the structure. RMSE was used as a criteria estimator of the accuracy. The data period ranges from 1979 to 2019 in the Gulf of Mexico exacted from WaveWatch III. The lowest RMSE among different locations is 0.104, while the different time step scenario has an RMSE of 0.715. Because wind speed data is much easier to get from either hindcast dataset or actual measurement, the proposed method with the resulting accuracy will make the forecasting of wave power density much easier. The method has the ability to be implemented in other wave thriving locations, which fills the gap of forecasting on wave height and period based on buoy data given a lack of measurements, as well as reflecting the correlations between wind speed and wave density, thus providing support for a quantitative correlation model based on a deep-learning-based model.