A comparison of the UK offshore resource from the marine data exchange

Conducting offshore meteorological measurement campaigns is an expensive requirement of the offshore wind farm development process. This paper analyses the offshore wind measurements made publicly available by the Crown Estate to build understanding of the UK offshore atmosphere. The work makes use of data from 14 locations spanning 16 years from both masts and lidar. Some variation in mean wind speed profiles and prevailing wind directions are found, however the associated turbulence intensity shows less variability between sites. The UK average hub height wind speed is calculated to vary by 4ms-1 throughout the calendar year and average 8ms-1, though these values depend on which datasets are considered. The south-west is shown to be the prevailing wind direction with small variation around the UK whilst the modal turbulence intensity is 6% and is shown to vary little throughout turbine operating wind speeds.