Sea State Monitoring by Ship Motion Measurements Onboard a Research Ship in the Antarctic Waters

A parametric wave spectrum resembling procedure is applied to detect the sea state parameters, namely the wave peak period and significant wave height, based on the measurement and analysis of the heave and pitch motions of a vessel in a seaway, recorded by a smartphone located onboard the ship. The measurement system makes it possible to determine the heave and pitch acceleration spectra of the reference ship in the encounter frequency domain and, subsequently, the absolute sea spectra once the ship motion transfer functions are provided. The measurements have been carried out onboard the research ship “Laura Bassi”, during the oceanographic campaign in the Antarctic Ocean carried out in January and February 2020. The resembled sea spectra are compared with the weather forecast data, provided by the global-WAM (GWAM) model, in order to validate the sea spectrum resembling procedure.