Modeling of wind farms in the operational weather forecasting model HARMONINE-AROME

Wind farms affect the atmosphere, especially by reducing the wind speed downwind of the farm, referred to as wind farm wake. Those wakes can last 50 – 100 kilometers, especially offshore. Thus, their impact is relevant to include in weather forecasting, especially considering the unprecedented build of wind farms that we are seeing now and which is projected for the future. Wind farm parameterizations (WFPs) can be used to represent the effect of wind farms in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models.
Within this work, we apply two different WFPs in the European NWP HARMONIE-AROME, analyze their impact on the forecast, and evaluate the forecast performance against measurements. To this end, a European wind turbine database has been developed. Using the database, we test different scenarios, one containing all onshore and offshore turbines in the domain and one containing only offshore turbines, to derive the importance of also including onshore turbines.