User's Manual
FutureWaves™ User Manual
FutureWaves™ v1.7.0.1
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The Confidence Level is used to select how much system error to include in computing threshold
exceedance. A higher confidence level means more conservative limits to meet operating
conditions.
Micro-Forecast Panels
The Micro-Forecast panel provides detailed information on each time-domain forecast produced
by the system. The panel can be ‘popped-out’ by clicking on the smaller ‘+’ on the upper right.
Clicking the large ‘+’ provides a pop-out with additional signal-processing information. An
overview of the Micro-Forecast Panel is displayed in Figure 18.
FutureWaves™ generates a new time-domain forecast of incoming waves and the resultant
vessel motions as often as possible with the processing resources available. The limiting
processing component is typically the algorithm which computes amplitudes and phases of the
discretized ocean wave-field components. This component is referred to as the 360o spectral
extractor (SE360). As it begins a new processing cycle (typically every ~1.5 secs in the current
system), SE360 uses any new radar data collected since the last processing cycle, and combines
it with previously collected data as required to compute the desired wave components. These
wave components are then used to compute the forces imparted on the vessel. As each forecast
is updated, new motion predictions are also computed. Since new data is introduced with each
update, the predictions can vary. If the radar measurements and corresponding ocean wave
velocities are consistent then the results of each forecast should also be consistent. The Micro-
Forecast displays previous forecasts in a waterfall so that they can be compared to the more
recent forecasts.
Figure 18:
Micro-Forecast Panel
Overview
The ship motion time series shows the current forecast output as the green-line going from the
center to the right in the Time Series plot. In Figure 19, the forecast is for the ‘Roll’ motion of’
Own Ship’, as indicated by the blue-circled drop-down menus.