News

DOWA (Dutch Offshore Wind Atlas) project granted

04 July 2017

Ine Wijnant (RDWD) has succesfully led the proposal DOWA, now funded, in which ECN, KNMI and partners join forces to to extend the KNMI North Sea Wind Atlas with years 2013-2019 and to make another atlas for 2008-2017 with a better representation of the diurnal cycle and an option for further downscaling with LES (Large-Eddy Simulation).

Within RDWK, Jeanette Onvlee, Pier Siebesma and Jan Barkmeijer have been involved in the LES and HARMONIE aspects of the proposal. The project combines information from LES, ERA5, HARMONIE and a suite of observations (including wind observations from Mode-S EHS and ASCAT) to make a wind atlas that better represents the daily cycle and that provides information for LES modelling, and also to assess the potential impact of wind farms on the wind climate by investigating how to include the effects of the wake of entire wind farms in Harmonie. In the 2 year DOWA-project we will also make LES time series in six different ways. The LES simulations (both with and without wind turbine parametrisation) will first be based on ERA5 and at a later stage on DOWA. The LES-simulations based on DOWA will also be attempted with the innovative “nudging method” where forcing will not be done at the grid-points, but only at the outer boundaries of the volume to be downscaled.