Posters

Abstract

How power production from wind farms will change in the future is a question of interest to many. Climate change may affect power production through changes in wind speed and circulations patterns, as well as air temperature, density, and pressure. Wind farms in cold regions are affected by atmospheric icing through the winter months, with significant impacts on the power production, and therefore changes in the icing climate is also relevant here. In regions with complex topography, we cannot rely on global climate model projections to assess climate change impacts, due to their course resolution. Therefore, we need data with a higher spatial resolution and accuracy, obtained through what we call downscaling. Here we will present future climate projections from a dynamical downscaling of two different climate models and three future scenarios, to a horizontal scale of 12 km. The climate models are the newest generation of models from the Couples Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) archive, implying that these are state-of-the-art data. We have further applied an icing model to the data, to obtain information on accumulated ice amount and frequency, including melting and sublimation processes. We will present projections of changes in the wind resource and the icing climate over the Nordic region based on these data. Climate change signals for wind are generally weak in climate models, however, projections of atmospheric icing show some significant trends in our data. Although the trends are significant, they differ between the two models applied.