Abstract
The U.S. shift towards offshore wind and renewable energy is very encouraging, however, it is critical to ensure this is not done at the expense of marine wildlife and the marine ecosystem. We worked to support Project Wildlife and Offshore Wind (WOW), funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and BOEM by conducting an exploratory cross-scale characterization of oceanographic data within offshore wind energy areas in the Northeastern U.S. Atlantic Coast. We focused on spatial and temporal coverage of Vineyard Wind 1, Empire Wind, Atlantic Shores South, and their surrounding regions. Our characterization focuses on spatial and temporal coverage that can potentially help downscale existing habitat-based density models by identifying when extrapolation is appropriate and guiding more targeted, efficient research and monitoring efforts.
In order to tackle this project, we acquired the following oceanographic data from multiple sources: sea surface temperature, chlorophyll A concentration, sea surface height anomalies, bottom temperature, wind speed, depth, sediment type, and seabed form. Glider path data was also acquired from the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and overlaid on top of the study area. The wind lease energy sites were buffered by 10 kilometers prior to any calculations in order to remain consistent with other Project WOW analysis. The subregions were all cut off at the 500-meter isobath and the New York/New Jersey Bight area was split at the Hudson Canyon to subset out the Northern and Southern halves
Zonal statistics was conducted to calculate averages or the relative percent coverage of all the variables for each study area. The resulting dataset was run through a Pairwise Euclidean Distance function in R, and a Multivariate Clustering analysis tool in ArcGIS Pro. The results were visualized as maps or heatmaps to provide insight into: 1) What kind of data is available within the study area and how is it distributed, 2) Is the available data able to be extrapolated from one site or region to another, and 3) Are the field study sites initially chosen by Project WOW (Vineyard Wind 1 and Empire Wind) representative of the areas they are in. For this third question, we added an additional 18 sites to our dataset and conducted another Multivariate Clustering analysis.