The proper definition of the wind filed at sea is of considerable interest for offshore operation, design, transportation and installation of oil and gas off-shore facilities as well as for the identification of suitable sites and the design of offshore wind energy production facility.&nbsp;&nbsp; However, this task suffers from the relative scarcity of offshore wind measurements to validate wind model usually used for the assessment.&nbsp;The paper presents a comparison of the publicly available NOAA-CFSR global re-analysis data set against offshore wind measurement collected in West Africa, Mediterranean Sea, Barents Sea and NW Australia, &nbsp;with the goal to investigate - in widely different meteorological conditions - the overall model reliability, in term of statistical indices of performance and ascertain of which averaging duration the three hourly model wind speed data are actually representative. The offshore measurements are collected at different heights above water level and with different averaging periods and have been referenced to 10m and 1h using standard height/duration engineering relationships (see DNVGL-RP-C205). At the same time advantage has been taken of the availability of relatively high frequency wind data (10min) to attempt a verification of DNV Froya model of wind averaging duration.The results indicate that: 1) the Froya model provide a good approximation of the wind duration relationship, with a slight tendency to underestimate the wind speed; 2) the NOAA-CFSR winds are too low to represent 10 min averaging, while data do not allow to discriminate between 1h and 3h. Consequently, the wind data set has been considered as hourly - in accordance with standard practice in offshore engineering – for model validation.Finally, validation of model data has been performed showing that the model usually performs quite reliably, with a bias usually within 10%-15% and a general trend to overestimate the low wind speed and to underestimate the wind speed peaks. This general trend present strong local variability, with e.g. excellent model performance in NW Australia and rather poor behavior on both the Barents Sea and West Africa. With regard to the wind direction, results show that the bias ranges from 2° for NW Australia and East Mediterranean locations, to more than 60° in the South Adriatic. The Pearson correlation is often poor, giving good values (greater than 0.8) only for NW Australia and East Mediterranean.

NOAA-CFSR Offshore Wind Validation

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/IOWTC2021/volume/84768

ASME 2021 International Offshore Wind Technical Conference (IOWTC2021)

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