Spectral Wave Sensors

Tender description

Since the late 1980’s the Met Office has operated a network of marine automatic weather stations around the UK. Observations from the network, particularly from the moored buoys to the west of the British Isles, provide early warning of severe weather conditions. Each system reports air pressure, air and sea temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, significant wave height and average wave period every hour. The meteorological data gathered from these buoys goes to support calibration and verification of our forecast models. In addition, these data are made available under contract to a number of external customers/users. Moored buoys are generally regarded as providing the highest quality observations of a wide range of marine meteorological variables and the data are also used to provide information on the climatology of oceanic areas, ‘ground truth’ reference data for satellite calibration/validation and estimates of surface fluxes. Met Office’s Marine Observations Group require a directional spectral wave sensor to operate on the network of moored buoy platforms deployed in both in-shore and off-shore locations. The unit shall measure vertical and horizontal displacements in a manner that, when suitably processed, will determine the significant wave height, maximum wave height, average wave period, spectral wave period, mean wave direction (of dominant waves) and directional spread (of dominant waves). Keywords: Marine, Spectral wave, Wave height, Wave sensors, Observations, Directional wave