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Marine Climate and Ocean Monitoring Systems along the Texas Coast

NOAA maintains and supports three offshore bouys along the Texas Coast. The closest bouy to the Texas coast is station 42035 which is located 22 nm east of Galveston. The National Data Bouy Center (NBDC) provides this wave data along with additional climatological and marine information online.

Wave information (spectral wave data) is derived from bouy motion measurements. The wave measurements reported by NDBC are not directly measured by sensors on board the buoys. Instead, the accelerometers or inclinometers on board the buoys measure the heave acceleration or the vertical displacement of the buoy hull during the wave acquisition time. A Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is applied to the data by the processor on board the buoy to transform the data from the temporal domain into the frequency domain. Response amplitude operator (RAO) processing is then performed on the transformed data to account for both hull and electronic noise. It is from this transformation that non-directional spectral wave measurements (i.e., wave energies with their associated frequencies) are derived. Along with the spectral energies, measurements such as significant wave height (WVHGT), average wave period (AVGPD), and dominant period (DOMPD) are also derived from the transformation.

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