PNNL

Abstract

The Second Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2) is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded program, with private-sector and university partners, which aims to improve the accuracy of numerical weather prediction (NWP) model forecasts of wind speed in complex terrain for wind energy applications. A core component of WFIP2 was an 18-month field campaign which took place in the U.S. Pacific Northwest between October 2015 and March 2017. A large suite of instrumentation was deployed, including three 449-MHz and eight 915-MHz radar wind profilers (RWP) with radio acoustic sounding system (RASS) temperature profilers, 18 wind-profiling Doppler sodars, 5 scanning wind lidars, 5 profiling wind lidars, 4 profiling microwave radiometers, 10 microbarographs, a network of sonic anemometers, and many surface meteorological stations. The instruments were deployed in a series of telescoping arrays, ranging from 500 km across to a densely instrumented 2 x 2 km area similar in size to a high resolution NWP model grid cell. Observations from these instruments are being used to 1) improve our understanding of the meteorological phenomena that affect wind energy production in complex terrain, 2) evaluate and improve model physical parameterization schemes, and 3) assimilate into models. We present several brief case studies using these observations to describe phenomena that are routinely difficult to forecast, including wintertime cold pools, diurnally driven gap flows, and mountain waves/wakes. Observing system and data product improvements developed during WFIP2 are also described.