5.6 Development of a 10-year wind resource climatology with Global WRF

Stoelinga, Mark T, James McCaa, and Rhea George, Vaisala

Novel wind energy technologies seek to tap the rich wind resources available at ever higher heights above ground level (hundreds of meters above current utility scale turbine hub heights). However, to "prospect" for the best energy resources at such heights, new climatologies of wind resource are needed. Furthermore, they are needed with the challenging dual requirement of global coverage and high spatial resolution. To produce such a global wind climatology, Vaisala turned to the Global WRF model. This unique flavor of WRF, which was derived from a planetary atmosphere version of WRF, has modifications for computation on a lat/lon grid, including polar fourier filtering. Vaisala ran the Global WRF model in a unique combination with spectral nudging toward a reanalysis dataset, to retain both the observational fidelity of the reanalysis and the high resolution capability of WRF. The model was run for 10 years at 10 km resolution, with further downscaling of the effects of high-resolution terrain and land use (2 km) using a mass-conserving flow model. This presentation will discuss the challenges to running Global WRF for climate simulations, and the unique characteristics of the valuable dataset produced in this exercise.