Creating wind field time-series over the Southern Baltic area using a dynamical downscaling approach

• Main Author: Bartosz Czernecki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Borntraeger 2013-10-01
• Series: Meteorologische Zeitschrift
• Subjects: baltic sea basin; dynamical downscaling; wind engineering; wind field; wrf
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0454

The aim of the research is to explore the possibility of using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model 3.2.1 (WRF) for creating synthetic wind speed time-series in the southern part of the Baltic Sea. The hourly wind speed time series derived from a mesoscale model were forced by the NCEP/NCAR re-analysis dataset for the period of 1991?2000 using 2-way nesting domains with horizontal resolutions of 27 and 9 km. Realism of spatial and temporal structure of the dataset was validated against in-situ offshore and onshore measurements. The dataset confirms the wind speed patterns over the Baltic Sea obtained in previous studies. The validation procedure proves that the model represents the spatio-temporal structure of the wind field well with a temporal correlation of around 0.80 for those stations with an undisturbed, high quality archive dataset. It was found that the model tends to underestimate wind speeds over offshore areas and overestimate them over onshore areas, especially for the near-surface wind field. Additionally, the author briefly presents the transition of wind speed in coastal areas as they are of great interest to the renewable energy community.