Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit (WEST): A Wind Mapping System for Use by the Wind-Energy Industry

Abstract

A state-of-art wind mapping system, the Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit (WEST), was developed in the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) for use by the wind energy industry. WEST is based on a statistical-dynamical downscaling approach, i.e. (i) a statistical analysis of climate data to determine the basic atmospheric states, and (ii) a dynamic adaptation of each basic state to high-resolution terrain and surface roughness by using mesoscale and microscale models. The approach has already been used by Frank and Landberg (1997), in their KAMM/WAsP method, to create a numerical wind atlas. The novel part of WEST is the fixed wind-speed interval in classification scheme and the integration of different modules (meso-/micro-scale models and statistical module) into a single toolkit in a more portable form. WEST was built for use by industries not having sophisticated computer facilities. WEST is applied to the Gaspé region of Canada. The mesoscale model MC2 (operated within WEST) is run at 5 km resolution, while the microscale model within WEST is at 200 m resolution. The simulation results are evaluated in comparison with tower observations at a height of 40 m above ground level. The mean of the 29 observed sets of wind data is 6.6 m/s. The mean absolute difference between the observed and simulated sets of wind data is 0.83 m/s with MC2 (meso-component of WEST) and 0.69 with ‘full WEST’ (with both meso- and micro- components). The correlation coefficient of the mean wind-speeds between the simulations and observations for the 29 stations is improved from 0.5 with MC2 to 0.7 with WEST.