Power Estimates of Coastal Zone Winds and Waves via Box, Whisker and Outlier Distributions at Atlantic Eastern Seaboard and Pacific Ocean Energy Sites

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has a congressional mandate and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) both have mandates to assess oceanic wind and oceanic wave energy and power resources and impacts; both structural and potentially ecological. Oceanic offshore winds and waves are viewed as being relatively steady sources of energy. However assessments of the amount of the wind resources and wave resources in U.S. coastal and oceanic environments have not been evaluated and have only been estimated by several rudimentary modeling efforts. As such, there are many National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) Marine Buoys which have collected considerable data on both wind and waves that can be harvested and evaluated for in-situ observations. Also the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) is charged with the development of hazard curves for wind energy areas off the Atlantic Seaboard. As such BOEM has several proposed U. S. Eastern Seaboard, Atlantic Ocean energy/power sites. Likewise DOE is interested not only in potential Atlantic sites, but Pacific sites as well. In this manuscript we captured several representative time series of winds and waves from NOAA buoys, and evaluated those sites for their oceanic wind energy and wave energy potential, by employing a basic statistical methodology. The data sets are very self-consistent, and levels of energy vary as a function of locale, monthly, seasonally and annually. While ecological studies are called for at BOEM sites, such as on fisheries and other living marine resources, those are beyond the scope of this study.