Abstract
Knowledge gaps still exist regarding the interactions between individual offshore structures and the marine environment. Recently, more field data has been made available to the public, providing unprecedented opportunities datasets and further to validate existing laboratory advance knowledge of scour development and its main drivers from data-driven approaches.
This study aims to advance understanding of the drivers of local scour and spatial erosion by comparing bathymetry and scour data from offshore wind farms (OWFs) with hydrodynamic conditions. The focus of the paper lies on the analysis of the spatial distribution of scour within a selected UK OWF and the investigation of the influence of storm events on the time evolution of scour at a tripod structure in the German Bight (Alpha Ventus). Analysis elucidates that at the Robin Rigg wind farm, the distribution of scour depths has a weak relationship with water depths, but a more reasonable relationship with the direction of tidal current velocities. At Alpha Ventus, single storm events can lead to an increase of the scour depth or a significant backfilling, depending on the angle of superposition of waves and tidal current.