Short-Term Wave Forecasting for Real-Time Control of Wave Energy Converters

Real-time control of wave energy converters requires knowledge of future incident wave elevation in order to approach optimal efficiency of wave energy extraction. We present an approach where the wave elevation is treated as a time series and it is predicted only from its past history. A comparison of a range of forecasting methodologies on real wave observations from two different locations shows how the relatively simple linear autoregressive model, which implicitly models the cyclical behavior of waves, can offer very accurate predictions of swell waves for up to two wave periods into the future.