P44 Stability analysis for different wind farm locations using WRF high resolution simulations

Prósper Fernández, Miguel Ángel, Carlos Otero Casal, Ignacio Fernandez Díaz, and Gonzalo Miguez Macho, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain

WRF model is becoming a generalized tool in the wind energy industry due to its capacity to simulate local flow dynamics on wind farm surrounding environments. We focus here on the impact of different atmospheric stability situations on the local turbulent conditions in selected wind farm locations. These play an important role because are directly related to energy production and have a major influence in the design life of the machines. We perform high resolution horizontal and vertical model simulations and evaluate model performance comparing with on-site temperature tower observations at four wind farm locations in different parts of the planet with diverse climate and terrain characteristics.
A period of one year is simulated for each area. Stability conditions are described by using a seven class scale obtained from vertical temperature gradient. Results show that WRF yields accurate stability analyses, with a good representation of the planetary boundary layer. The clustering of the results allows to identify representative situations in order to define initial and boundary conditions for Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations.