Last week was not an ordinary week. It was the week of the 1950-1978 extension of ERA5 public release by the ECMWF; see HERE.
As an amateur genealogist of Wind & Site studies, but also as a wind practioner, I could not be happier: 28 more years! This allows for stepping back in time and doing all sorts of interesting things. I would like to mention, shortly, three examples:
- The analysis of wind- and metocean papers and experiments which took place prior to 1979. And there are many of them;
- The analysis of extreme events (storms, ice winters);
- The analysis of long-term climatic variations.
The first example stems from the wind energy field study carried out by E. Golding in the 1950s. See here below: I am comparing measurements at the Mynydd Anelog hill (Wales), and at the present day Gwynt y Môr wind farm: the correlation is striking!
The second example shows the hurricane that crossed Denmark on the 17-18th of October 1967. These wind speeds in this storm are the largest in the ERA5 dataset, for the Danish West Coast.
The third example shows annualised mean wind speeds in the middle of the North Sea, for different movind averages periods (1, 5 and 10 years). The second plots shows the winter NAO index (which explains some/much of the variance in mean wind speeds at this location). Yayy, this opens up for interesting work!
Thank you, ECMWF*
*But please, do something about these surface wind speeds during storms…
Comments/suggestions are welcome,
Rémi
