Georgia Institute of Technology Ocean Science and Engineering - OSE

The recently completed resource assessment for ocean current energy (Haas et al. 2013) utilized fairly simplistic analytical methods to estimate the extractable energy from the Gulf Stream System as well as to analyze the relative impacts of large scale energy extraction. This level of analysis can be considered to be accurate to an order of magnitude and only provides an idea on the overall trends of the impacts of extraction. Much higher resolution modeling is required to accurately determine the overall impacts of extraction for both localized and far field effects. Therefore any model system would need to resolve the entire North Atlantic Ocean as well as have high enough resolution to adequately resolve the flow in and around a deployed array of turbines. We therefore are proposing to develop a two-way coupling of the HYCOM model, resolving the full ocean, with the regional ocean model ROMS, resolving the array field.