Marine Energy Atlas

The NLR Marine Energy Atlas is an interactive web application for exploring marine energy resource data across the United States.

What Is the Atlas?

The Marine Energy Atlas provides a visual interface for browsing summary statistics from the wave and tidal hindcast datasets. Users can explore spatial patterns, compare locations, and download point data without writing code.

Browse Data

1. Navigate to maps.nlr.gov/marine-energy-atlas
2. Select a dataset layer (e.g., "Tidal Mean Current Speed")
3. Use the map controls to zoom to your area of interest
4. Color-coded grid cells show variable magnitudes across the domain

Query Point Data

The atlas includes a point query tool for extracting data at specific locations:

1. Select the point query tool from the toolbar
2. Click on a grid cell of interest
3. View summary statistics for that location
4. Download the data as CSV

How Our Datasets Appear on the Atlas

The Marine Energy Atlas displays summary-level data (processing level b5_vap_atlas_summary_parquet) derived from the full hindcast datasets. These summaries include:

• Significant wave height, wave power, and period statistics (wave)
• Mean and 95th percentile current speed and power density (tidal)
• Water depth, tidal range, and grid resolution (tidal)

For full time-series data, use HSDS or AWS S3 to access the complete datasets.

Relationship to This Documentation

The atlas provides visual exploration - this documentation provides technical detail. Together they serve different stages of the user journey:

Need	Where to Go
"Where is the tidal resource strongest?"	Marine Energy Atlas
"What variables are available?"	Wave Variables or Tidal Variables
"How was this data produced?"	Tidal Methodology
"I need the full time series"	HSDS Setup or AWS S3