A milestone within the NEWA project has been reached: The mesoscale production runs which will form the backbone of the New European Wind Atlas have been launched on the supercomputer MareNostrum in Barcelona.
The New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) will be mainly based on mesoscale simulations with the weather model WRF. After a period of extensive preliminary tests and analyses the mesoscale team in NEWA decided on a final setup for the mesoscale production runs and launched the first production runs on the supercomputer MareNostrum in Barcelona. The wind conditions of the past 30 years are simulated throughout Europe, including all EU countries, Turkey, the entire North and Baltic Seas and further offshore areas (100 km off the coastline). With a resolution of 3 km in space and 30 min in time a tremendous amount of some 6 Petabytes of raw model data is produced. As it is not feasible to store the data, the raw data will be discarded and only heavily post-processed and reduced data will be permanently stored – still an impressive amount of some 180 Terabytes of data.
The production runs are estimated to need about six months for completion – a normal desktop computer would need about 1,600 years.
Once the mesoscale wind atlas is complete, the data will be downscaled to 50 m resolution by using the WaSP generalized wind methodology. A WRF multi-physics ensemble will provide information about uncertainties. Furthermore, information about extreme winds will be derived from the mesoscale and downscaled data. Another component of NEWA is an open-source model chain based on WRF and OpenFOAM (beta version already released). The final NEWA database will also include the data of several large field experiments performed during the project.