Posters

Abstract

Retrievals of offshore wind fields from satellite sensors are performed in near-real-time by the Technical University of Denmark. The wind fields are available for extensive areas worldwide via an open online archive. Despite the free and easy access to this archive, the uptake and use of satellite winds in connection with planning of offshore wind farms in practice has been limited so far. Users in the wind energy industry have expressed concerns about the trustworthiness of satellite winds; especially in coastal areas where many different factors influence the local wind conditions. Coastal areas remain the most attractive for large-scale offshore wind farm installations with bottom fixed foundations. The objective of this work is to shed light on the potential sources of uncertainty related to satellite wind retrievals over coastal seas. We first examine the effects of hard targets (e.g. ships and wind turbines) through a systematic removal of very bright pixels in the SAR images. Next, we investigate uncertainties caused by different phenomena in the coastal zone on the wind speed retrieval: shallow-water bathymetry, fetch, and local changes of the wind direction due to meteorological phenomena such as mountain wakes and gap flows. All of these factors have a direct or indirect impact on the wind speed retrieval accuracy and these impacts are quantified. Our findings can potentially be used to implement quality flagging in the distributed SAR wind products to better guide the end users of these products.