Wind Climate Simulation over Complex Terrain and Wind Turbine Energy Output Estimation

A statistical-dynamical downscaling procedure is applied to investigate the climatological wind field over a complex terrain area in central Germany. The model domain, 80×87 km, is dominated by flat terrain in the westerly and northerly part and encompasses the Teuteburger Wald and the Wiehengebirge areas with hills up to 330 m a.m.s.l. in the southeasterly region. The downscaling procedure combines a large-scale regionally representative wind statistic and a high-resolution numerical atmospheric mesoscale model. A cluster analysis of a 12-years time series of radiosonde data provides 143 clusters each being a combination of the geostrophic wind components and the vertical temperature gradient. These parameter sets constitute the reference state for highly-resolved steady-state wind field simulations with a non-hydrostatic model. Weighting the resulting wind fields with the corresponding cluster frequency gives climatologically representative frequency distributions of the wind speed and -direction.