A Downscaled Wind Climatology on the Outer Continental Shelf

Abstract

31-yr time series of boundary layer winds has been developed for a region on the outer continental shelf. This simulated time series was designed to be suitable to study the wind resources for a potential offshore wind farm. Reanalysis data were used to initialize a series of high-resolution numerical simulations. The limited number of high-resolution numerical simulations was repeatedly sampled using an analog matching criterion that is based on the reanalysis data to create a 31-yr time series with 500-m spatial resolution and 10-min temporal resolution. Validation against buoy data indicates that combining the reanalysis and resampled high-resolution numerical simulations produces a much more accurate wind speed distribution than does the reanalysis alone. Both the model physics and downscaled resolution may be contributing to the observed performance gains.