New European wind atlas offshore

Ioanna Karagali,Jakob Mann,Charlotte Hasager,Merete Badger,Andrea N Hahmann

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1037/5/052007

Abstract

The New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) is a joint research effort from eight European countries, co-funded under the ERANET Plus Program. The projects’s final aim is the creation and publication of an state-of-the-art electronic European wind atlas. An offshore wind atlas extending 100 km from the European coasts is foreseen within the project, based on mesoscale modelling and various observational datasets. Satellite wind retrievals from scatterometers and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instruments are used to validate offshore modelled wind fields and to identify the optimal model configuration. The aim is to present the initial outputs from the offshore wind atlas produced by the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model, still in pre-operational phase, the METOP-A/B Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and SAR derived winds. Different experiments were established to evaluate the model sensitivity for the various domains covered by the NEWA offshore atlas. ASCAT winds are used to assess the performance of the WRF-derived offshore atlas. In addition, ASCAT and SAR winds were used to create an offshore atlases, where various spatial wind characteristics, such as channelling and lee effects from complex coastal topographical features, are visualised.

Highlights

The aim of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) project is the creation and publication of a European wind atlas of unprecedented accuracy [28, 29]
This study demonstrates the use of wind information over the ocean as derived by satellites during the last 16 years, to describe ”long-term” features of the offshore wind conditions, within the framework of the New European Wind Atlas project
The temporal availability of satellite wind retrievals is reduced compared to in-situ measurements and model simulations, mean wind speeds over the entire period of satellite data availability revealed persistent features, common in both the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) datasets

Summary

Introduction

The aim of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) project is the creation and publication of a European wind atlas of unprecedented accuracy [28, 29]. Satellite observations of the wind over the ocean surface can prove valuable as indicators of the resource distribution and provide information about the areas where high-resolution mesoscale model experiments can be performed. The full QuikSCAT archive was used in [15, 19, 21] to perform validation, resource assessment and long-term characterisation of the surface winds, especially their spatial variability compared to modelled wind fields. [1] performed an extrapolation of the mean wind from SAR at turbine relevant heights, using a long term stability corrected wind profile derived from mesoscale model simulations. Since for wind turbine hub-heights offshore levels higher than 10 m are more relevant, extrapolation of the long-term mean winds to higher atmospheric levels was performed, using a 10-year long stability correction profile from the mesoscale model WRF [1].

Data and Methods

Results

Conclusions