Monopile-induced turbulence and sediment redistribution form visible wakes in offshore wind farms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Offshore wind farms are becoming an increasingly common feature in the marine environment as a renewable energy source. There is a growing body of evidence on the effects of wind farms on the seabed and its organisms. However, an important and understudied aspect of site development is the interaction of turbine foundations on the surrounding marine environment. Structures exert significant disturbance on tides, waves and currents; these are visible as optically-distinct, elongate wakes at the sea surface with elevated suspended particulate matter. Despite this, there is uncertainty on the mechanisms that lead to the visible manifestation of wakes at turbine foundations, primarily due to a lack of direct measurements. Here, in situ measurements along with a 15-year time series of satellite images of the Thanet offshore wind farm, located within the Thames Estuary, were used to investigate the formation of visible monopile wakes, and the effects these have on the surrounding water column. We show the optically distinct wakes are near-constant at Thanet; visible in >90% of all satellite images, yet no regional change in sea surface turbidity could be attributed to wind farm construction or operation. Monopile wake in situ water samples and acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) backscatter measurements demonstrated colour change related to elevated sea surface sediment concentration. However, averaged water column measurements of suspended sediment within wakes, and upstream of monopiles, remained consistent. These measurements demonstrate that sediment was redistributed towards surface waters, rather than additional sediment becoming suspended in the wake. ADCP velocity measurements supported a mechanism of sediment lofting towards the surface, with enhanced vertically upwards flow recorded in wakes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".