High Resolution Solar and Wind Energy Datasets for Ireland

Project Description

The objectives of the project was to prepare, and make available, long-term, high-resolution time-series and gridded datasets of ;solar radiation fields (for thermal & PV applications) and ;onshore and offshore wind energy fields for Ireland. It was expected that applications of the datasets would include the development of a solar atlas for Ireland and a possible update of the SEAI wind atlas. In addition, the datasets will be shared with industry and third level institutes and hence promote wind and solar research and development in Ireland. ICHEC have recently completed two high-resolution downscaled re-analysis simulations of the Irish climate. This was achieved by downscaling ECMWF ERAInterim data for the period 1980-Present using the Regional Climate Models (RCMs), COSMO-CLM5 and WRF v3.7.1 at maximum spatial resolutions of 1.5km and 2km, respectively. The results will be comparable to observations and will provide fields not available from the observational archive (e.g., hourly wind speed, direction & air density at various heights, high resolution surface solar and thermal radiation fields). The RCM data will be post-processed using methods such as 'scale roughness' and 'linear model' correction in order to produce finer resolution gridded datasets (~100m) required for solar and wind energy applications.