A WRF and MM5-based four-dimensional data assimilation weather analysis and forecasting system for wind energy applications
Abstract
Accurate high-resolution weather analyses and forecasts are very important for wind energy production and management. A Real-Time Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (RTFDDA) and forecasting system has been developed at NCAR to address meteorological needs for estimating wind- energy generation through downscaling with nested grids. The RTFDDA system is built around the Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model version 5 (MM5) and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. It is capable of continuously collecting and ingesting diverse synoptic and asynoptic weather observations from conventional and unconventional platforms, and provides continuous 4-D synthetic weather analyses, nowcasts and short-term forecasts for mesoscale regions. Operational RTFDDA systems have been implemented at seven US Army test ranges and also have supported tens of other applications in military, public and private sectors in the last seven years, providing rapidly updated, multi-scale weather analyses and forecasts with the fine-mesh domain having 0.5 - 3 km grid increments. The observational data ingested by the system includes WMO standard upper-air and surface reports, wind profilers, satellite cloud-drift winds, commercial aircraft reports, all available mesonet data, radar observations, and any special instruments that report temperature, winds and moistures. Recently, the system has been expanded to include several new modeling and data assimilation capabilities that are highly valuable for wind energy applications: a) Ensemble RTFDDA, which is a multi-model, mesoscale data analysis and forecasting system that samples uncertainties in the major components of RTFDDA and predicts the uncertainties in the weather forecasts by performing an ensemble of RTFDDA analyses and forecasts; b) LES (Large Eddy Simulation) modeling, which is nested down from the RTFDDA mesoscale data assimilation and forecasts to LES models with grid sizes of ~100 m for wind farm regions using GIS 30-m resolution terrain; and c) HRLDAS (High- Resolution Land-Surface Data Assimilation System), which assimilates high-resolution satellite vegetation and soil data to generate high-resolution, accurate soil moisture and temperature, which is critical for the evolution of the boundary layer structure and thus improves turbine-height wind energy and turbulence predictions. The capability of the modeling system is demonstrated with a case study for a wind farm located in southwest New Mexico, where nested domains were used with grid increments from 30 km down to 0.123 km.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2008
- Bibcode:
- 2008AGUFM.A13G..03L
- Keywords:
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- 3307 Boundary layer processes;
- 3315 Data assimilation;
- 3329 Mesoscale meteorology;
- 3355 Regional modeling;
- 3379 Turbulence (4490)