The 44-year Mediterranean HIPOCAS wind database: A useful tool to analyse offshore extreme wind events from a long-term regional perspective

Nowadays, many efforts are leading to use the high potential offshore wind energy resources. A detailed assessment of the offshore wind resources arises as a first-rate requirement. Most of such assessment is based on extreme offshore wind atlas generated mainly from global reanalysis and satellite data. Both sort of data show certain shortcomings related, among others, to coarse spatial resolution and time inhomogeneity issues, respectively. This snag seems to be crucial over areas such as the Mediterranean Basin, which is characterized by a complex land-sea distribution and a significant orography. The HIPOCAS Mediterranean long-term (1958-2001) wind database comes to overcome the aforementioned reanalysis shortcoming and provides a Mediterranean wind data set useful to perform extreme wind analysis. This contribution also deals with a statistical extreme wind analysis over the whole Mediterranean offshore areas. Extreme return periods and levels are obtained from annual maxima using a number of distributions. Additionally, an alternative regional statistical method based on regional L-moment statistics is also proposed. The regional technique is applied to reduce uncertainty and allows a higher number of measurements to be included in the analysis. using data from a homogeneous region instead of from a single location. The herein performed extreme wind analysis provides a detailed assessment of high wind offshore areas over the Mediterranean and constitutes a subject of great interest for evaluation of wind resources. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.