Wind climate simulation over complex terrain and wind turbine energy output estimation

Abstract

A statistical-dynamical downscaling procedure is applied to investigate the climatological wind field over a complex terrain area in central Germany. The model domain, 80x87 km, is dominated by flat terrain in the westerly and northerly part and encompasses the Teuteburger Wald and the Wiehengebirge areas with hills up to 330 m a.m.s.l. in the southeasterly region. The downscaling procedure combines a large-scale regionally representative wind statistic and a high-resolution numerical atmospheric mesoscale model. A cluster analysis of a 12-years time series of radiosonde data provides 143 clusters each being a combination of the geostrophic wind components and the vertical temperature gradient. These parameter sets constitute the reference state for highly-resolved steady-state wind field simulations with a non-hydrostatic model. Weighting the resulting wind fields with the corresponding cluster frequency gives climatologically representative frequency distributions of the wind speed and -direction. A comparison of observations at synoptic stations with simulation results shows a good agreement regarding the mean wind speed but larger differences for low wind speeds and an over-representation of southwesterly wind directions. By combining the wind speed frequency distribution with the power curve of wind turbines the yearly energy output of 46 wind turbines inside the simulation domain was calculated and compared to the actual production. No bias or systematic trend in the deviation was found. The relative differences for the smallest turbines reach 100 percent with a decreasing tendency to larger units.