Wind Portfolio Climate Variability Analysis

Designed for: Developer & Engineer/Consultant

For pricing and purchase details:

Product Description

Primary Uses

Understanding long-term wind resource variability
Utility-scale site assessment
Project funding allocation
Meteorological mast fleet optimization
Construction decisions

3TIER's Portfolio Climate Variability Analysis (or PCVA) gives you the confidence you would have if all of your met towers had been collecting data for over a decade.

Portfolio Climate Variability Analysis (PCVA) delivers long-term wind time-series, so you know earlier which projects are most promising before waiting for 12 to 18 months of observational data. Monthly updates of time-series allow you to make informed decisions about capital deployment, equipment choices, and project priorities with scientifically derived data at near real-time.

PCVA balances the in-depth, long-term climatology of our FullView Wind Site CVA with the scalability, responsiveness, and lower cost per site necessary for larger scale wind developers with an extensive network of meteorological towers. 3TIER can deploy PCVA across an entire portfolio of met towers ranging in size from several to several hundred, even if the time duration of observations is different for each tower within your portfolio. By returning 10 years of model simulated observation data for each tower on a monthly basis, PCVA supports more robust internal assessment and enables developers to evaluate and re-prioritize their entire portfolio of development sites on an on-going basis.

Each month PCVA takes the most recent month's observational data for each location, reevaluates climate variability based on a 10+ year NWP (Numerical Weather Prediction) model simulation, and returns the entire modeled record extension for each location within a few days. The final result is a long-term time-series of hourly values for each met tower in your portfolio. This time-series is continuous, which means it does not contain missing values and will span a period of no less than ten years, allowing an effective and comprehensive analysis of the energy potential at a given site. In cases, where there is at least one month of observational met tower data, 3TIER can apply MOS (Model Output Statistics) to the model simulated data to remove model bias and significantly improve RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) as compared to the on-site observational data.

Technical Overview

Product Features

Improved Analysis and Reporting
With a long-term perspective on hourly wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and pressure values, you can regularly evaluate your entire portfolio and have consistent and comprehensive data available to easily incorporate into your own analysis. In addition, PCVA makes it simple to assign assessment costs to individual projects by providing project-by-project invoicing.
Security
A secure password protected web host server, following secure file transfer protocol, is used for the transfer of all client-provided data to 3TIER, and for the transfer of all modeled data back to the client.
Quality Assurance
To ensure that the most accurate analysis is performed, 3TIER will send error reports as soon as an error in data processing or data transfer is found. For example if observational data are missing in whole or in part for a specified tower, 3TIER will notify the client and give them an opportunity to repair the error in the data transfer and resubmit observational information if necessary. 3TIER will then quickly perform the analysis and return it to the client.

Deliverable

Each month, 3TIER will deliver a comma-separated value (CSV) file of hourly values for each met tower from the model simulation for 10 or more years. If at least one month of observational data is available, a MOS-corrected time-series can also be delivered.

Methodology

3TIER processes publicly available coarse-resolution historic gridded data with a state-of-the-art NWP model to generate accurate 5 km gridded time-series data across large geographic areas. 3TIER primarily employs an NWP model called WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting). This model is widely supported and continually enhanced by the global atmospheric science and research community. Unlike traditional models that merely interpolate observed wind speeds between widely dispersed points, 3TIER's system integrates innovative physics-based methods, which simulate the interaction between the atmosphere and the earth's surface, to create a more robust and accurate wind climatology. This technique captures the myriad processes responsible for wind—from jet level dynamics to surface level processes and everything in between.

Where sufficient observational data is available, model data can be further refined to your specific location(s) using 3TIER's proprietary method of applying MOS, which statistically corrects and adjusts the variance of the simulated NWP model output to remove bias. MOS is computed individually for each met tower location using all months of provided observational data. MOS-corrected data better represent both the mean value and the variability of the observed wind resource at each tower location.

Find our validation papers here.

Customer Requirements

In order to put PCVA into operation, 3TIER must receive the meta data, such as coordinates and sensor height, for each met tower and, with the client, establish consistent identifiers for each met tower. In addition, on an ongoing monthly basis the client must provide an observational data file in a CSV format for all met towers where the analysis is requested.

If you are unfamiliar with the technical terminology on this page, please visit our Glossary for more information.