Assessment of the Offshore Wind Speed Distributions at Selected Stations in the South-West Coast, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper assessed the offshore wind speed distributions at 10 m height in the southwest coast of Nigeria using a high-resolution satellite observations at 0.25˚ spatial grid resolution. Satellite wind speed and direction recorded over a 10-year period (2002–2011) were derived from the CCMP L3.0 data. The monthly, seasonal and annual wind characteristics for energy conversion based on three probability distributions were assessed. The Rician and Weibull models gave better fitting of the offshore wind speed at the southwest coast compared to the Rayleigh model. Results also revealed that the monthly mean wind speed variation exhibits a rather non-monotonic trend across different grid points driven by changes in the weather system activities while further investigation reveals higher wind speed and power density at the coastal region than over land in the northern Nigeria. The monthly mean wind speed recorded at the coastal region ranges between 4.99 and 5.56 m/s, 5.32 m/s for the interannual mean wind speed with the summer (JJA) and autumn (SON) mean wind speed distributions ranging from 6.11–6.76 m/s and 4.86–6.17 m/s, respectively, at 10 m height asl. The coastal wind speed distributions show that energy conversion at the southwest region of Nigeria is viable.