Life’s a breeze: Modelling offshore wind to unlock weather resources

From surfing after work to a swinging cricket ball, most Australians are already familiar with the regular arrival into our lives of a sea breeze.

For some, it helps to cool down our sweltering cities on a hot summer evening, or it announces the end of a day at the beach by whipping up waves and sand. In Perth, they even have a name for its welcome, cooling effect – the Fremantle Doctor. 

Sea breezes form as land heats up faster than the ocean, drawing cooler air onshore and setting up a shallow circulation along the coast.

What you may not realise is that offshore wind in Australia, including the sea breeze, is a vast and – as yet – untapped weather resource. 

Wind turbines are already dotted around the coast of smaller countries like the United Kingdom. 

Here in Australia, we’re now starting to explore promising areas for coastal wind power, near Bunbury in Western Australia and along the Bass Strait in Victoria. 

Perhaps surprisingly for such a familiar figure among our weather patterns, the behaviour of the sea breeze is quite hard to pin down. 

A new study led by Dr Andrew Brown from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century set out to tackle a deceptively simple question – can we reliably identify sea breezes using the models we depend on for weather and climate analysis? 

The answer is yes, but only if we are very careful about how we do it. The results of this new work have been published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development. 

Why does it matter? Well, for offshore wind farm developers, sea breezes are not a minor detail. They can boost afternoon wind speeds during hot summer days, rapidly shift wind direction across wind farms, change the timing of peak generation, and influence turbine loading and reliability. In parts of southeast Australia, sea breezes could peak in the late afternoon, coinciding with periods of highest electricity demand during heatwaves. 

The challenge is that sea breezes are small, fast-evolving, and easily confused with other weather systems such as cold fronts, storms, or topographically driven flows. Most existing identification methods work well at individual locations but break down when applied across complex coastlines and varied terrain. 

To address this issue, Andrew and his collaborators used high-resolution atmospheric models to identify sea breezes, carefully filtering out look-alike features and evaluating results against observations and satellite imagery. The study shows that model resolution matters, that different methods capture different parts of the sea-breeze life cycle, and that coastal geometry and terrain strongly shape the wind resource. 

As Australia invests in offshore wind, understanding coastal winds properly matters. Offshore wind is a weather resource, sea breezes are part of its machinery, and learning how to see them clearly is a critical step toward building a resilient clean energy system.

Beyond offshore wind, the methods developed in this study could be applied to help understand the drivers of heatwaves along the coast, or coastal thunderstorm behaviour.

But for now, one group of key stakeholders in particular are certain to lead the charge for more information.

“Every time I give a talk, there’s usually at least one surfer who comes up to me with questions afterwards,” Andrew said.

“Surfers are just so interested in sea breezes.”

They’re sure to be wiped out by the latest findings, as this gnarly research progresses our understanding of coastal wind.