Sea state estimation using multiple ships simultaneously as sailing wave buoys

The article presents initial ideas towards a network-based approach for sea state estimation used for marine operations and other maritime applications. In principle, all available means, ranging from in situ buoys, fleet of ships to remote sensing by satellite and aircraft, could be considered, emphasising that each means and any combinations among may act simultaneously. This study focuses on just one of the means; the use of ships as sailing wave buoys. The article introduces the wave buoy analogy, i.e. ship-as-a-wave-buoy, and it makes a proposal on how to impose (different) weights to the single ship-specific wave spectrum estimates obtained from multiple ships. Moreover, the work includes a discussion about the importance to associate a measure to reflect the (un)certainty of the wave spectrum estimate. The article presents a numerical case study, where multiple ships act simultaneously as wave spectrum-estimators. The case study relies on numerical motion simulations, as appropriate full-scale data is not yet available. In the analysis, it is shown that the use of simultaneous data from multiple ships leads to more accurate wave spectrum estimations.