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Preliminary assessment of the variability of UK offshore wind speed as a function of distance to the coast

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posted on 2016-12-16, 14:52 authored by Rolando Soler-Bientz, Simon Watson
In the UK, there is an interest in the expected offshore wind resource given ambitious national plans to expand offshore capacity. There is also an increasing interest in alternative datasets to evaluate wind seasonal and inter-annual cycles which can be very useful in the initial stages of the design of wind farms in order to identify prospective areas where local measurements can then be applied to determine small-scale variations in the marine wind climate. In this paper we analyse both MERRA2 reanalysis data and measured offshore mast data to determine patterns in wind speed variation and how they change as a function of the distance from the coast. We also identify an empirical expression to estimate wind speed based on the distance from the coast. From the analysis, it was found that the variations of the seasonal cycles seem to be almost independent of the distance to the nearest shore and that they are an order of magnitude larger than the variations of the diurnal cycles. It was concluded that the diurnal variations decreased to less than a half for places located more than 100km from the nearest shore and that the data from the MERRA2 reanalysis grid points give an under-prediction of the average values of wind speed for both the diurnal and seasonal cycles. Finally, even though the two offshore masts were almost the same nearest distance from the coast and were geographically relatively close, they exhibited significantly different behaviour in terms of the strength of their diurnal and seasonal cycles which may be due to the distance from the coast for the prevailing wind direction being quite different for the two sites.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

WindEurope Summit 2016 Journal of Physics: Conference Series

Volume

749

Issue

1

Citation

SOLER-BIENTZ, R. and WATSON, S.J., 2016. Preliminary assessment of the variability of UK offshore wind speed as a function of distance to the coast. WindEurope Summit 2016, Hamburg Messe, Hamburg, Germany, Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 749 (1), 012004, doi:10.1088/1742-6596/749/1/012004

Publisher

IOP Publishing Ltd © the authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2016-09-12

Publication date

2016

Copyright date

2016

Notes

Content from this work may be used under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

ISSN

1742-6588

eISSN

1742-6596

Language

  • en

Location

Hamburg Messe, Hamburg, Germany

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