Wind Potential for the Caribbean Region of Colombia: High-Resolution Validation and Assessment with Wrf

Abstract

High-resolution wind power assessment is key for planning of wind farms. However, this information is scarce for the Caribbean region of Colombia. We assess the annual wind power for this region, using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with two nested domains (9 km and 3 km) and 50 vertical levels with 15 minutes outputs for the northern coast of South America. We evaluated the performance of the YSU, MYJ and QNSE parameterization schemes for the planetary boundary layer of WRF in the simulation of near surface winds of the months with the strongest and weakest winds, compared to observations at stations and ERA5 reanalysis. We found that WRF accomplishes an accurate simulation of phase and amplitude of observed wind diurnal cycles, extreme values, and hodographs in terms of correlations, standard deviations, bias and Weibull distributions. Using the QNSE scheme, we validate the Wind Power Density (WPD) at the stations. Based on the validation, we found areas within the domain with WPD at 100 m up to 1,200 Wm-2 onshore and 2,000 Wm-2 offshore, with annual values above 400 Wm-2. In this regard, WRF provides a valuable platform for future forecasting of wind power in this Caribbean region.