Changes in surface wind speed and its different grades over China during 1961–2020 based on a high‐resolution dataset

Abstract

AbstractChanges in surface wind speed are important for wind energy planning, especially in China, which has the highest new and total wind power capacities globally. In this article, based on a daily high‐resolution observation dataset for the period of 1961–2020, changes in the surface wind speed and its different grades over China were analysed. The results showed that following significant declines from 1961 to 2002, the annual and seasonal mean surface wind speeds began to increase over China and most of its subregions (all subregions except for East China) after 2002. Opposite trends were found in the probabilities for most different grades of surface wind speed from 1961 to 2002 and from 2002 to 2020. In addition, we compared the results with those from NCEP‐1, JRA‐55, and ERA5, which showed that all of the reanalysis data could reasonably reproduce the observed spatial distributions of the surface wind speed and its different grades, although with bias in values and smaller interannual variabilities. The wind reversal over China was closely related to changes in the trends of the sea level pressure gradient. Moreover, the variation in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has a significantly negative correlation coefficient with the surface wind speed over East, Central, and South China.