Abstract
An accurate offshore wind resource assessment is a key tool for planning marine wind renewable exploitation. To achieve this goal, without resort to an extensive and costly network of anemometric stations or buoys, it becomes necessary to use the so-called atmospheric mesoscale models. This work presents a high spatial resolution (1x1 km) offshore wind resource Atlas for Portugal and the model calibration steps. During the calibration steps, the most adequate: i) atmospheric parameterizations - physics options, ii) initial and boundary conditions (IBC) meteorological datasets, and iii) data assimilation scheme were achieved through sensitivity tests using the common statistical metrics and hourly simulated/observational data. Results show that the most significant improvements are associated with the IBC dataset and the data assimilation scheme used. Thus, the results show that the assimilation procedures coupled with the new ERA-5 reanalysis dataset reduce significantly the errors of the wind speed and direction, especially the normalized mean square error. This reduction, depending on the different calibration setup, can be above 50%. The new Atlas confirms the previous indicators, Portugal presents a high wind power potential, especially for deep offshore regions.
Highlights
Offshore wind energy is a key contributor towards the decarbonisation of several electrical power systems
The most adequate: i) atmospheric parameterizations - physics options, ii) initial and boundary conditions (IBC) meteorological datasets, and iii) data assimilation scheme were achieved through sensitivity tests using the common statistical metrics and hourly simulated/observational data
This paper presents the calibration and model setup procedures for obtaining the new offshore wind Atlas for Portugal with a spatial resolution of 1x1km adequate to describe the atmospheric variability derived from the wind phenomena over the sea and in the cross-border sea/land areas
Summary
Offshore wind energy is a key contributor towards the decarbonisation of several electrical power systems. It was concluded that the state-of-the-art numerical models used for weather forecast purposes are a valuable tool to produce accurate wind Atlas at regional/national scale These results are supported by recent works, e.g., [8,9,10,11] that computed climatological wind maps for heights near the most common hub height of commercial offshore wind turbines. Meteorological Boundary and Initial Conditions One of the main sources of error and uncertainty in the wind resource assessment, when numerical mesoscale models are applied, is derived from the initial and boundary conditions (IBC) meteorological data that fed the model, which are essentially atmospheric information provided by reanalysis and/or analysis products [14]. 3. Data and Methodology The new wind offshore Atlas for Portugal, presented in this work, is based on atmospheric numerical simulations using the MM5 model. For contractual confidentiality reasons it is not possible to show the average wind speed for some observed measurement systems, and, the focus will be given to the comparison of the common metrics applied in this type of work
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