What you get
Summary report
A PDF with the site's key facts and workability grade, then the wave, wind and current climate: how each varies through the year, roses of where they come from, and a written summary of each. It ends with the workability of each activity and how the site compares with the 50 nearest wind farms or cable stretches. Choose Wind farm site or Cable route to score it for that kind of work.
Timeseries
An hourly wind, wave and current timeseries for 1995–2024, formatted for Aventis, ODSL's weather downtime tool.
How workability is graded
Every offshore job waits for a weather window: a spell long enough to start and finish the work with waves, wind and current all inside the limits for that job. MetMap counts how often those windows open.
For each activity it works through every hour of 1993–2023 and finds the share of time the work can start and run for its whole window, such as 12 hours for cable jointing with waves under 2.5 m. It does this month by month and takes the typical month as the activity's workability. Wind is ERA5's hourly mean at 10 m, adjusted to each activity's working height and averaging period with the DNV-RP-C205 wind profile.
The overall score is a weighted mean of the activities, graded on this scale:
Wind farm sites
- CTV Accessibility
- SOV Walk-to-Work
- Survey
- Rock Install
- Pile Install
- TP Install
- Jacket Install
- Cable Pull-in
- Cable Lay
- WTG Jack-Up
- Tower & Nacelle Install
- Blade Install
Cable routes
- Route survey
- Boulder Clearance
- PLGR
- Cable lay
- ROV launch & recovery
- Burial / trenching
- Rock placement
- Mattress / stabilisation
- Cable jointing
Landfall pull-in, Nearshore Geophys and Diving are scored and shown at each end of a cable, but kept out of the route's grade.
What the map shows
West-facing coasts grade worse than east-facing ones, on both sides of the equator. At these latitudes the prevailing winds blow from the west, so swell built over the open Atlantic and Southern Ocean runs straight onto western coasts all year, while eastern coasts sit in the lee of the land. Off the west of Ireland waves are under 1.5 m about a quarter of the time; in the Irish Sea, over 90% of the time. The wind differs far less than the waves do.
Data
- Waves
- Copernicus Marine Service wave reanalyses: the regional models for the North-West European Shelf (1.5 km), Iberia–Biscay–Ireland (3 km), Baltic (2 km), Black Sea (2.5 km) and Mediterranean (4.2 km), and the global model (about 20 km) everywhere else.
- Currents
- Copernicus Marine ocean physics reanalyses for the North-West Shelf, Iberia–Biscay–Ireland and Mediterranean, and its global total surface currents elsewhere.
- Wind
- ERA5, ECMWF's reanalysis for the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
- Water depth
- EMODnet Bathymetry in European waters, and NOAA's global relief model elsewhere.
- Wind farms
- Global Energy Monitor's Global Wind Power Tracker (CC BY 4.0).
- Cables
- OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL): 159 interconnectors and 91 wind farm export cables, graded in stretches of about 20 km.
Good to know
MetMap is for screening and comparing sites, not for design or planning. Reanalysis models are not measurements, the limits are typical for each activity rather than set for a particular vessel, and the written summaries are generated automatically and can contain mistakes. For project data, ODSL validates the models against measurements near the site and models the actual operation.
About ODSL
MetMap is made by ODSL, an ocean data science and offshore modelling consultancy. ODSL also makes Aventis, a weather downtime tool for planning offshore campaigns. Questions, or a site you'd like looked at properly: info@odsl.co.