Mr Greg Williams¹

¹RPS Metocean, Jolimont, Australia

Developing metocean criteria for design, engineering, and operations are important stages in the planning, construction, and operation of any offshore or coastal asset.  Methodology and approaches are well established in the offshore oil&gas industry, where they are driven largely by safety and cost.

Global offshore wind markets require similar metocean criteria to inform resource availability, investment, site-selection, design, construction, and operations – but with more direct application of measurement and prediction to energy production. As a result, a new class of metocean measurement devices have emerged in the form of floating wind profilers – providing the means to refine engineering assumptions and prediction systems associated with near-surface wind profiles. This presentation reviews the state of surface wind measurement, contrasts wind height conversions and parameterisations used in engineering design and predictive modelling, and explores opportunities for improvement across offshore industries.

Biography:

Greg Williams is a metocean specialist with over 25 years meteorological/oceanographic, NWP, and ICT experience.

Greg has extensive experience in the development and management of technology implementations in the metocean space, including specialist forecaster workstations, realtime observation and satellite processing systems, distributed geographical information systems and interfaces, large scale cluster, cloud and distributed database systems, and interactive web-presentation and visualisation portals.

He has managed modelling teams and data management services for major metocean companies and defence agencies, in areas of big-data analytics, HPC and cloud-migration services, and technical metocean consultancy to a wide range of industry groups in 17 countries.