Large-scale winds in the KNMI’14 climate change scenarios

The wind climate and its possible change in a warming world are important topics for many applications, among which marine and coastal safety and wind energy generation. Therefore, wind is an important variable to investigate for climate change scenarios. In developing the wind part of the KNMI’14 climate change scenarios, output from several model categories have been analysed, ranging from global GCMs via RCMs to suitably re-sampled RCM output. The main conclusion is that global warming will not change the wind climate over the Netherlands and the North Sea beyond the large range of natural climate variability that has been experienced in the past.