Windtrends information
WindTrends is a database of weather conditions spanning the years 1997 to 2009. WindTrends provides a weather snapshot every hour at several heights above ground on a regular grid with points every 20 km; a total of nearly 100,000 data records for each height and point. Included in each record are variables such as wind speed, direction, temperature and pressure.
Grid spatial resolution and extent on Europe.
Comparison, for two years (1988-1989), between observational data series and the same series created using Windtrends.
Meteosim Truewind, SL has developed a Regional Reanalysis covering the whole European Union countries that is an advantageous alternative to other public global reanalyses weather data bases such as the NCEP / GFS.
WinTrends, with its 20km spatial resolution and hourly data outputs spanning the years 1997 to 2009 allow the client to generate temporal and spatial homogeneous series that will permit an accurate reconstruction of the climatic patterns of different meteorological variables, facilitating the development of MCP studies, wind variability analysis in hourly, diary, monthly and annual intervals, and some others.
The data was created using the Mesoscale Atmospheric Simulation System (MASS), a proprietary state-of-the-art mesoscale model that has been customized for near-surface wind prediction and historical weather data. MASS is a non-hydrostatic numerical weather model similar to other well-known mesoscale models such as MM5 and WRF, but specifically adapted to wind resource assessment. To provide maximum consistency of wind trends through time, rawinsonde data from a fixed set of stations and heights were used in the objective analyses of the initial NNGR fields. Finally the data have been widely tested and validated through more than 50 quality surface meteorological stations and different met towers around Europe.
WindTrends offers two main advantages over public weather data bases such as the NNGR data set:
- Higher spatial resolution: 20 km for windTrends versus 200 km for NNGR. The higher resolution allows windTrends to produce a more accurate picture of the daily and monthly fluctuations in the wind climate, particularly in complex terrain. For the typical user, the result is a higher correlation with on-site observations.
- A consistent set of input observations: Unlike NNGR, the windTrends model employs weather observations from a fixed set of stations and heights throughout the simulation period. This approach produces a much better match between MeteosimTruewind’s modeled WindTrends and reliable wind measurements.
WindTrends helps wind industry professionals and other interested parties assess their wind resource and plant performance through time and have a better understanding of wind resource characteristics in the long term.
