The World of Wind Atlases – Wind Atlases of the World

Contents of the European Wind Atlas

The Atlas is divided into three parts, each intended for readers with different areas of interest – from laymen to professional meteorologists:

Part 1: The Wind Resource

Provides an overall view of the wind climate and magnitude and distribution of wind resources in the European Community countries. This part of the Atlas is intended to be useful to politicians, planners and laymen in general. The descriptions, figures, tables and colour maps permit a first, rapid identification of regions with favourable wind resources.

Contents of Part 1: The wind climate of Europe • Wind resource maps.

Part 2: Determining the Wind Resource 

Gives explanations and information needed for the purpose of regional wind resource assessments and the local siting of wind turbines. In addition, it contains descriptions, raw statistics, and wind atlas statistics for 220 meteorological stations in the EC. It also includes methods for calculating the influence on the wind resource of various features in the landscape such as coastlines, forests, hills, and buildings.

Contents of Part 2: General concepts • The roughness of a terrain • Shelter behind obstacles • The effect of height variations in the terrain • Regional wind energy potential • Use of the wind resource maps • Siting • Selection of wind climatology for a site • Roughness classification • Calculation of statistics for a site • Calculation of shelter • Orography • Power production • Determination of mean power production • Power density function • Power duration curve • Optimisation of power production • Station statistics and climatologies • Station description • Raw data summary • Regional climatology and mean values • Windclimatological fingerprints • Station statistics and climatologies • Radiosonde statistics.

Part 3: The Models and the Analysis

Explains in detail the meteorological background for the Wind Atlas. It describes how the analysis was performed from the data and station information, and discusses the physical and statistical basis for the Wind Atlas models. The validity of the models and the analysis is demonstrated through a number of comparisons between measured and modelled wind statistics.

Contents of Part 3: The physical basis • Surface-layer similarity laws • The geostrophic drag law and the geostrophic wind • The stability model • The roughness change model • The shelter model • The orographic model • The statistical basis • The Wind Atlas analysis model • The Wind Atlas application model • Meteorological data and station description • Radiosonde statistics • Limitations of data and models • Verification of the Wind Atlas methodology • Station intercomparisons • Validation against high meteorological masts • References • List of symbols • Auxiliary tables • Selection criteria and questionnaire • The data disk.