Wind conditions and resource assessment

The development of wind power as a competitive energy source requires resource assessment of increasing accuracy and detail (including not only the long-term ‘raw’ wind resource, but also turbulence, shear, and extremes), and in areas of increasing complexity. This in turn requires the use of the most advanced large-scale meteorological models and data together with a chain of modeling tools linking
the large-scale dynamics via the mesoscales to site-specific wind conditions.These wind conditions (at a given wind turbine site and height) are a complex function of ‘the weather’ statistics and of influence from features at smaller scales such as hills and mountains, surface roughness conditions, surface thermal properties, and specific nearby obstacles such as ‘other’ wind turbines. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.