Abstract—Hydrodynamic circulation in estuaries is primarily driven by tides, surface wind and river inflows. While tidal and river data can be quite easily obtained for input to hydrodynamic models, sourcing accurate surface wind data are problematic. Firstly, the wind data used in hydrodynamic models are usually measured on land and can be quite different in magnitude and direction from real offshore wind. Secondly, surface wind is spatially-varying but due to a lack of data, usually a non-varying wind speed and direction are specified across the full extents of a model domain. These problems can lead to inaccuracies in the surface currents computed by two-dimensional or three-dimensional hydrodynamic models. In the present research, a wind forecast model was used to generate a high resolution wind field at a marine renewable energy test site, Galway Bay. These predicted high resolution wind date can be used to investigate the effect of surface wind data resolution on model accuracy.
Index Terms—Wind field, high resolution, Galway bay, ARIMA.
The authors are with the Ryan Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland (e-mail: leirencomeon@gmail.com).
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Cite:Lei Ren, Jerome Sheahan, Stephen Nash, Diarmuid Nagle, and Michael Hartnett, "Estimation of the High Resolution Wind Field at Galway Bay," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 353-356, 2016.
