Current Projects
Metocean Monitoring Campaign for Offshore Wind Energy
Since 2016, WHOI has carried out a long-term metocean monitoring campaign at the ASIT. The project was initially supported by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and maintains a Zephir 300M vertically profiling lidar system at the tower as well as two standard cup anemometers and one wind vane at the top of the tower structure. A Windcube V2.0 was maintained on the ASIT from 2016-2021, and after a period of validation with the Zephir lidar was relocated to The Nantucket Test Site (NTS) in November 2021. AWS-Truepower-UL has provided third-party validation of all metocean installed sensors. Data from the system have been used by developers in resource assessments and power purchase agreement bids as well as by researchers (e.g. Bodini et al. 2019). The Windcube lidar was removed from the tower for servicing and re-validation in 2019, before being reinstalled October 2019. Recently, this observational effort has begun supporting the U.S.-based lidar-buoy validation efforts with the two DOE-owned buoys being successfully validated at the ASIT during the first few months of 2020.
See current vertical wind profile data here, and please contact MVCO for more information about the program, data access, or use of the facility as a validation location.
Northeast U.S. Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research (NES-LTER)
The NES-LTER project integrates observations, experiments, and models to understand and predict how planktonic food webs are changing, and how those changes may impact the productivity of higher trophic levels. NES-LTER project lead, Heidi Sosik, and collaborators conduct biological observations at the MVCO offshore tower including an underwater microscope, the Imaging FlowCytobot. The NES-LTER project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
See phytoplankton in near-real-time at the IFCB Dashboard here: https://ifcb-data.whoi.edu/timeline?dataset=mvco