DEVELOPMENT OF A COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMIC MODEL FOR PREDICTING WIND POTENTIAL IN A SMALL AREA

—NESTING CALCULATIONS WITH A MESO-SCALE METEOROLOGICAL MODEL AND COMPARISON WITH DOPPLER SODAR OBSERVATIONS—

Abstract

A three-dimensional, computational fluid dynamic model (CFD) model written in the generalized curve-linear coordinate system is developed for use in the prediction of wind potential distribution over complex terrain in limited areas. The CFD model is operated with a meso-scale meteorological model, which is written in the terrain following coordinate system. An iso-parametric coordinate transformation method is applied to prepare the initial and the time-dependent lateral boundary conditions of the CFD model from the product of the meso-scale meteorological model. Some case studies with the nested model were performed and the vertical distributions of the wind velocities produced by the model were compared with those obtained from Doppler sodar observations and the upper air soundings at the nearby meteorological station. Through the comparison, it is found that the nested model can reproduce essential feature of the observed vertical wind profiles well. This indicates that the data transfer from the meteorological model to CFD model is done adequately by the present method.