VERIFICATION OF THE BUOY-SIMULATION HYBRID METHOD FOR OFFSHORE WIND RESOUCE ASSESSMENT AT HORS

Abstract

 The authors have been developing a new method for offshore wind resource assessment, which uses surface meteorological measurements from a buoy and a mesoscale model-simulated vertical wind speed profile to estimate hub-height wind speed. In this study, this buoy-simulation hybrid method is verified using surface and LIDAR measurements obtained on the pier of the Hazaki Oceanographical Research Station (HORS). It is found that when wind comes from a sea sector, the estimation accuracy is comparable to that found for an open ocean in previous studies. However, the accuracy of a 1-D model becomes considerably worse for winds coming from a land sector, and a 3-D mesoscale model (WRF), which can take effects of atmospheric stability and horizontal advection into account, is required to estimate offshore winds with an acceptable accuracy.