Test case for wind profile program: Reading

As a quick test for the code, I've compared the data produced from the wind profile code with the field site data at Reading University (-0.9685°E, 51.445°N). The fieldsite at Reading measures the wind speed and angle at 10m.

Running the wind profile code

The code was run with the following namelist file

 &PLACE
	latitude=51.445,longitude=-0.9685,height=10.0
 &END
 &WINDDATA
	startDate=19790123,endDate=20111130,
	inputDir='/export/master/data1/marc/wind/data',
 	outputDir='/home/godiva/wind/test_case'
 &END

called nmlReading and was run with a driver file which provides the input for code without waiting for the user to enter it. The driver file in this case was simply a file called input that contains the answer to the only equation the program asks, which is `nmlReading'. The code was then run with the following command

master$ ../code/DetermineWind < input

and it produced the files wind_lon-1.0_lat51.4_h10.0_19790123-20111130.csv and wind_lon-1.0_lat51.4_h10.0_19790123-20111130.nc.

January 2011

Below are plots of speed and angle for the first 30 days of 2011. January 2011 is fairly typical of the results we get for any time period. The output from the wind profile program using the MERRA re-analysis is shown as the solid line and Reading fieldsite as the dotted line.

Speed

Angle

The MERRA re-analysis seems to capture the angle of the wind well. For the speed it captures the characteristics of the fieldsite speed fairly well, but does seem to over predict the magnitude of the speed by about double. Whether this is because the fieldsite in Reading is slightly sheltered by buildings, or because the MERRA re-analysis underestimate the roughness around Reading, or something else is not known.