Site Characterisation

Introduction

The Site Characterisation module (SC) receives as input the environmental data of the chosen site and provides the user the main characteristics of this site in terms of bathymetry, seabed types, marine species, waves, tidal currents, winds and water levels. It includes time series of pertinent parameters as well as statistics on these parameters like probability distributions, scatter diagrams or extreme values.

Structure

This module’s documentation is divided into four main sections :

• Tutorials that give step-by-step instructions on using Site Characterisation for new users.

• How-to Guides that show how to achieve specific outcomes using Site Characterisation.

• An explanation section gives technical background on how the tool works.

• The API reference section documents the code of modules, classes, API, and GUI.

Functionalities

The SC Module realises the following tasks:

• Database extractions: input databases are selected by the user, and the SC module reads all the input files and extracts the requested variables.

• Compute statistics based on the extractions: based on the extracted variables, a list of statistics is computed, from basic ones to multivariate extreme values analysis.

The complete execution time of the SC module (extraction + statistics computation) is approximately 10 minutes.

Workflow for using the Site Characterisation module

The workflow for using the Site Characterisation module can be summarised as 1) provide inputs, 2) perform an assessment depending on the complexity level, and 3) view the results, as shown in the following figure.

Overview of Site Characterisation data requirements

This section summarises the types of input data required to run the Site Characterisation module. At complexity levels 1 and 2, the user can select an example site based on the level of wave and tidal energy (low/medium/high). At complexity level 3 the user can upload their own site data.

Section	Complexity 1	Complexity 2	Complexity 3
Waves	Select level of energy	Select level of energy	Time series of all variables
Tidal current	Select level of energy	Select level of energy	Time series of all variables
Bathymetry	None or a constant value	None or a constant value	Constant value or a Netcdf file
Lease Area	None	None	Shapefile of the lease area
Export cable Corridor	None	None	Shapefile of the corridor
Seabed type	None	None	Netcdf file
Roughness length	None	None	Netcdf file. Expressed as \(z_0\) in m
Species	None	None	Netcdf file. Expressed as %

The format of each files is described into the How-To Guides.