Documentation for wind profile program
Introduction
The wind profile program provides wind speeds for any given latitude, longitude and height up to about 70m. It does this by extracting data from the MERRA re-analysis netCDF files, and so the region it covers and the time is covers is restricted by the MERRA data available. The MERRA re-analysis appears to run from the 23 Jan until about a month before current time.
The wind profile program was originally commissioned by the National Grid who wanted an indicator of the wind power they could expect at proposed locations for wind turbines. This area was a generous area covering the British Isles. The MERRA re-analysis data was chosen largely because it is free for a commercial company to use, but also because it provides one of the better resolutions over the UK and, rather uniquely, provides wind speeds at both 2m and 50m as well as the normal 10m above the surface.
These webpages cover
- Downloading the data: how the MERRA data can be downloaded.
- Compiling wind profile program: the requirements and the arguments needed to compile the wind profile code.
- Running wind profile program: explains what the input parameters are.
- How the code works: explains the interpolations that are employed by the code to produce the output.
- Test case: output from the code is compared with fieldsite data from Reading.