Improving Wind Speed Forecasts at Wind Turbine Locations over Northern China through Assimilating Nacelle Winds with WRFDA

Abstract

Abstract To improve the wind speed forecasts at turbine locations and at hub height, this study develops the WRFDA system to assimilate the wind speed observations measured on the nacelle of turbines (hereafter referred as turbine wind speed observations) with both 3DVAR and 4DVAR algorithms. Results exhibit that the developed data assimilation (DA) system helps in greatly improving the analysis and the forecast of wind turbine speed. Among three experiments with no cycling DA, with 2-h cycling DA, and with 4-h cycling DA, the last experiment generates the best analysis, improving the averaged forecasts (from T + 9 to T + 24) of wind speed over all wind farms by 32.5% in the bias and 6.3% in the RMSE. After processing the turbine wind speed observations into superobs, even bigger improvements are revealed when validating against either the original turbine wind speed observations or the superobs. Taken the results validated against the superobs as an example, the bias and RMSE of the forecasts (from T + 9 to T + 24) averaged over all wind farms are reduced by 38.8% and 12.0%, respectively. Compared to the best-performed 3DVAR experiment (4-h cycling and superobs), the experiment following the same DA strategy but using 4DVAR algorithm exhibits further improvements, especially for the averaged bias in the forecasts of all wind farms, and the changing amount in the forecasts of the enhanced wind farms. Compared to the control experiment, the 4DVAR experiment reduces the bias and RMSE in the forecasts (from T + 9 to T + 24) by 54.6% (0.66 m s−1) and 12.7% (0.34 m s−1).