Publication Date:
2022-10-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Bodini, N., Lundquist, J. K., & Kirincich, A. US East Coast lidar measurements show offshore wind turbines will encounter very low atmospheric turbulence. Geophysical Research Letters, 46(10), (2019):5582-5591, doi:10.1029/2019GL082636.
Description:
The rapid growth of offshore wind energy requires accurate modeling of the wind resource, which can be depleted by wind farm wakes. Turbulence dissipation rate (ϵ) governs the accuracy of model predictions of hub‐height wind speed and the development and erosion of wakes. Here we assess the variability of turbulence kinetic energy and ϵ using 13 months of observations from a profiling lidar deployed on a platform off the Massachusetts coast. Offshore, ϵ is 2 orders of magnitude smaller than onshore, with a subtle diurnal cycle. Wind direction influences the annual cycle of turbulence, with larger values in winter when the wind flows from the land, and smaller values in summer, when the wind flows from open ocean. Because of the weak turbulence, wind plant wakes will be stronger and persist farther downwind in summer.
Description:
Collection of the wind data was funded by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center through agreements with WHOI and AWS Truepower. The authors appreciate the efforts of the MVCO/ASIT technicians and AWS staff who collected the data. This analysis was supported by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (AGS‐1554055) to J. K. L. and N. B., and by internal funds from WHOI for A. K. This work was authored (in part) by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract DE‐AC36‐08GO28308. Funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid‐up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. The lidar observations used here are described at https://www.masscec.com/masscec-metocean-data-initiative, and available at https://doi.org/10.26025/1912/24050. The postprocessed data and the scripts used for the Figures of the present paper can be found at https://github.com/nicolabodini/GRL_OffshoreTurbulence.
Description:
2019-11-01
Keywords:
Turbulence
;
Offshore wind energy
;
Lidar
;
Wakes
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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