Abstract
In the present work, wind and wave climate baselines are derived on the basis of historical hindcast data. The data covers two areas where there are existing wind farms, described in Sec. 1, namely one east of UK (East Anglia One, EAO), and one west of Portugal (WindFloat Atlantic, WFA).
For this, two regional numerical models, atmospheric model WRF and wave model SWAN, described in Sec. 2.1, have been run for ten (10) years, and results have been generated every 1 hr. Detailed geographical in formation has been acquired from EMODNET database. Wind and wave boundary conditions have been taken from global database ERA5. Then, wind and wave data have been statistically analyzed, and various aspects of their probabilistic structure have been investigated. See Sec.2.2 for a detailed description of the statistical methods implemented for this study.
Results include mean annual and inter-annual variability, study of the probability structure in the form of probability quantiles (50%, 90%, 95%, 90%, 99.9%), directional distribution, extreme value estimation for return periods (50, 100 years), long-term trends, study of the probability of the duration of an event (e.g., “the time that wave height lies below 3m for more than 12 hours”), as well as the waiting time (weather window) until this event will happen again. See Sec. 3.1 for area EAO, and Sec. 3.2 for area WFA.
In addition, to support the baseline analysis and enhance metocean characterization of the regions understudy for the WindTwin project, data from public repositories such as EMOD net were examined. For this study, all available buoy observations near the two target areas were used and compared against corresponding single-point model outputs. The comparison between in situ and simulated winds in both study areas (WFA and EAO) demonstrated that, despite the regional differences in wind, the model provides reliable representation of both climates. See Sec. 2.3 for the methodology followed, and Secs. 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 for the results.
The final conclusions of this work are given in Sec. 4