Examining the offshore wind environment near the coast line by numerical weather prediction with sub-kilometer scale resolution

Abstract

The constructions of the offshore wind turbine in Japan are in the stage of designing the bottom-mounted ones near the coast line. Numerical weather prediction models provide information of the detailed wind profiles, however, the effect of the land adjacent to the site may not be well captured because of the horizontal resolution with the order of kilometer. Recent improvement in the physics schemes on the models have enabled the usage of the model with sub-kilometer scale, and hence, it may be applicable for the above objective. Targeting Choshi site in Japan, we performed 200m horizontal resolution simulations for two individual two-weeks, which are selected by the reason that the wind directions were categorized within a small number of the sector. The simulated wind speed was consistent to the observations in terms of the probability distribution function of the scalar velocity. The two seasons showed a contrastive thermal stratification conditions, and this effect on the wind profiles are analyzed in detail.