Wave rider buoy 'very valuable'

Wave rider buoy 'very valuable'

Since 1995, NIWA’s wave rider buoy off Baring Head, near the entrance to Wellington Harbour, has been providing the harbourmaster, Toll NZ (formerly Tranz Rail), and the MetService with accurate measurements of the waves off Wellington’s south coast.

Captain Mike Pryce is the Wellington regional harbourmaster. The buoy sends raw data by direct radio link to the Beacon Hill communication station, so Mike and his staff have ‘live’ readings of waves as they occur, and processed wave statistics every 30 minutes.

Mike’s verdict on the buoy: ‘A very valuable management tool for harbour safety in bad weather.’ This, he says, is especially the case at night or during storms when Beacon Hill can’t judge the waves visually. Asked if the buoy may have prevented accidents, Mike says: ‘Definitely. The certain knowledge of sea conditions it provides has resulted in sailings being cancelled in a timely manner before damage has occurred.’ The data are processed at NIWA’s Greta Point campus and posted on a subscription-only website. Users can view graphs of the trends over the previous 6 days, as well as detailed statistics on wave height and wave period (the time it takes for successive waves to pass a fixed point) from20-minute blocks of data for the most recent 6 hours. The highest waves recorded to date have been just over 13 metres, on Waitangi Day 2002, and on 18 August 2004.

The buoy is operated year-round for the Greater Wellington Regional Council’s Harbours Department.