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In recent years, the global transition towards green energy, driven by environmental concerns and increasing electricity demands, has remarkably reshaped the energy landscape. The transformative potential of marine wind energy is particularly critical in securing a sustainable energy future. To achieve this objective, it is essential to have an accurate understanding of wind dynamics and their interactions with ocean waves for the proper design and operation of offshore wind turbines (OWTs). The accuracy of met-ocean models depends critically on their ability to correctly capture sea-surface drag over the multiscale ocean surface—a quantity typically not directly resolved in numerical models and challenging to acquire using either field or laboratory measurements. Although skin friction drag contributes considerably to the total wind stress, especially at moderate wind speeds, it is notoriously challenging to predict using physics-based approaches. The current work introduces a novel approach based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to predict the spatial distributions of skin friction drag over wind-generated surface waves using wave profiles, local wave slopes, local wave phases, and the scaled wind speed. The CNN model is trained using a set of high-resolution laboratory measurements of air-side velocity fields and their respective surface viscous stresses obtained over a range of wind-wave conditions. The results demonstrate the capability of our model to accurately estimate both the instantaneous and area-aggregate viscous stresses for unseen wind-wave regimes. The proposed CNN-based wall-layer model offers a viable pathway for estimating the local and averaged skin friction drag in met-ocean simulations. 

In order to improve the predictive abilities of weather and climate models, it is essential to understand the behaviour of wind stress at the ocean surface. Wind stress is contingent on small-scale interfacial dynamics typically not directly resolved in numerical models. Although skin friction contributes considerably to the total stress up to moderate wind speeds, it is notoriously challenging to measure and predict using physics-based approaches. This work proposes a supervised machine learning (ML) model that estimates the spatial distribution of the skin-friction drag over wind waves using solely wave elevation and wave age, which are relatively easy to acquire. The input–output pairs are high-resolution wave profiles and their corresponding surface viscous stresses collected from laboratory experiments. The ML model is built upon a convolutional neural network architecture that incorporates the Mish nonlinearity as its activation function. Results show that the model can accurately predict the overall distribution of viscous stresses; it captures the peak of viscous stress at/near the crest and its dramatic drop to almost null just past the crest in cases of intermittent airflow separation. The predicted area-aggregate skin friction is also in excellent agreement with the corresponding measurements. The proposed method offers a practical pathway for estimating both local and area-aggregate skin friction and can be easily integrated into existing numerical models for the study of air–sea interactions.