Using WRF to generate high resolution offshore wind climatologies

Abstract

Recently, the demand of gridded wind datasets over sea areas has increased due to the ongoing development of offshore wind farms. Currently available reanalysis datasets do not have enough resolution to deal with complex coastlines and coastal topography, and these do interact with the winds and meteorological systems well into the open sea. Here we present the main characteristics of a high resolution wind climatology that has been produced using the Weather Research and Forecasting model to downscale the ERA-INTERIM reanalysis. The simulations were carried out in a domain covering the Mediterranean basin and most of Europe, and thus areas with different wind regimes. The model has been kept close to the driving reanalysis by restarting it daily, as this running mode provided better results than nudging techniques. Results show that WRF is able to produce realistic offshore wind climatologies, probabilistic wind distributions and annual cycle. It also reproduces well-known regional winds remarkably well.