Prediction of Offshore Wave at East Coast of Malaysia—A Comparative Study

Abstract

Exploration of oil and gas in the offshore regions is increasing due to global energy demand. The weather in offshore areas is truly unpredictable due to the sparsity and unreliability of metocean data. Offshore structures may be affected by critical marine environments (severe storms, cyclones, etc.) during oil and gas exploration. In the interest of public safety, fast decisions must be made about whether to proceed or cancel oil and gas exploration, based on offshore wave estimates and anticipated wind speed provided by the Meteorological Department. In this paper, using the metocean data, the offshore wave height and period are predicted from the wind speed by three state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms (Artificial Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest). Such data has been acquired from satellite altimetry and calibrated and corrected by Fugro OCEANOR. The performance of the considered algorithms is compared by various metrics such as mean squared error, root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and coefficient of determination. The experimental results show that the Random Forest algorithm performs best for the prediction of wave period and the Artificial Neural Network algorithm performs best for the prediction of wave height.