New European wind atlas offshore

The New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) is a joint research effort from eight European countries, co-funded under the ERANET Plus Program. The projects's final aim is the creation and publication of an state-of-the-art electronic European wind atlas. An offshore wind atlas extending 100 km from the European coasts is foreseen within the project, based on mesoscale modelling and various observational datasets. Satellite wind retrievals from scatterometers and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instruments are used to validate offshore modelled wind fields and to identify the optimal model configuration. The aim is to present the initial outputs from the offshore wind atlas produced by the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model, still in pre-operational phase, the METOP-A/B Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and SAR derived winds. Different experiments were established to evaluate the model sensitivity for the various domains covered by the NEWA offshore atlas. ASCAT winds are used to assess the performance of the WRF-derived offshore atlas. In addition, ASCAT and SAR winds were used to create an offshore atlases, where various spatial wind characteristics, such as channelling and lee effects from complex coastal topographical features, are visualised. (paper)