ABPmer, a provider of metocean services and part of Associated British Ports Holdings Limited, has launched Version 2 of its weather downtime calculator which now has wider application across the offshore wind, subsea cable and oil/gas sectors.
ABPmer has been providing metocean information to the offshore sector for nearly a decade. In recent times this has included weather downtime statistics to inform operational planning, tender pricing and programme management.
The company’s weather downtime calculator was originally developed as an in-house tool, but in 2015 ABPmer launched the express service that provided offshore contractors with direct access to the tool and its global hindcast database. Downtime calculations take less than 10 minutes, which speeds up contractor decision-making, the company said.
The upgrades to the express service include allowing for specifying tasks that are ‘interruptible’ during the working schedule; providing additional information about partial completion of the whole operation, including Gantt charts showing the progress of the operations including weather downtime per task; enabling the use of externally supplied data to be used in the tool for calculations; and adding more detail to the specification of input parameters, i.e. more detail about the wind speed or wave period.
Bill Cooper, ABPmer Managing Director, said: “We are pleased to have been able to respond to industry requests and adapt the service to suit the differing needs of those operating in the offshore environment. Our online express service has proved to be extremely popular over the last year, giving offshore developers and operators the means to generate statistical information themselves whenever they want was evidently something lacking in the market.”