PNNL

Abstract

The eastern Hawaii coast in the United States is characterized by considerable wind resource fueled by persistent trade winds, making it an important area for wind energy research. Reanalysis models have broad earth science applications and support the wind energy community in a multitude of ways, such as providing long-term wind resource trends and serving as input boundary conditions for higher-resolution modelling. In addition, recent datasets have been developed with the specific intent to provide analysis for current and future wind energy projects. The need for reanalysis and wind dataset validation in locations where observations have been historically limited, such as offshore environments, is strong. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) owns multiple buoys with onboard lidar systems that collect wind speed observations across the wind turbine rotor layer along with meteorological and oceanographic data near the surface to characterize the wind resource. Lidar buoy data collected from a year-long deployment off the eastern coast of the island of Oahu allow for validation of commonly used reanalysis products and dedicated wind dataset. In this work, wind speeds from a reanalysis, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis version 5 (ERA5), a regional WRF simulation produced by the University of Hawaii (UH-WRF), and two wind datasets, the 2023 National Offshore Wind dataset (NOW-23) and Global Wind Atlas version 3 (GWA3), are validated at heights within the wind turbine rotor layer.