WIND PROFILES

when the lecture is finished, you should be able to understand the physics. 
And the theory behind the wind profiles, 
so you have a deeper understanding of the wind profiles. 
And you should be able to understand why, and know, that there is a difference 
between the wind profile during the night and during the day. 
The wind profiles are more complicated than will be presented here, but 
this is a simplified version, you can say. 
So first we look at the theoretical background. 
The simplest form for the wind profile is a so-called 
logarithmic wind profile, and that is shown at the top here.

The wind profile, the wind as a function of height, where Z is height 

is described as function of the U star, which is the momentum flux, 
it's a function of height Z and it's a function of the surface roughness, and 
it's a function of the stability function. 
In neutral conditions, the stability function is zero. 
The Psi there is the stability function, and therefore, 
we have a purely logarithmic profile in neutral condition. 
Neutral condition means that there is no heat flux from the surface, 
so it corresponds to overcast conditions with high wind speeds.

To the right you can see an example of the wind profiles. 

It's driven by a geostrophic wind. 
This case, 12 meters per second. 
And the geostrophic wind is a wind that drives the wind near the
surface. 
It's the wind speed at about 1 kilometer's height. 
It's characteristic that the wind varies a lot near the surface during the day and 
at night. 
The black curve is a neutral wind profile and 
in this representation here where the y axis is 
Logarithmic, it can be seen as a straight line. 
During the night it's difficult for the energy to come to the ground 
Because of the reduced momentum flux and 
the wind speed reduces near the ground. 
This is represented by the green line. 
But you can also see that although the wind speed is low 
near the ground, it increases fairly fast with height. 
And at a height of about 100 meters it can sometimes even 
be faster than the neutral wind speed. 
During the day there is a better of connection to the geostrophic wind. 
You have a higher wind speed during the day then during the night and 
it is represented by the red curve. 
You can also see that the wind speed varies little with height during the day, 
because of the large eddies and because of the efficient mixing during the day.

So already here you can see that the wind speed during the night and 
the wind speed during the day are very different, close to the surface. 
But you can also have an idea that about 100 meters above, 
the conditions are quite different.

So one of the parameters in the logarithmic wind profile is the surface 

roughness Z_0, and here we have an example of four classes of surface 
roughness, this represents sea conditions where surface roughness is very, very
low. 
In this case we have set it to 0.0002 meters and 
this is a fairly characteristic value for sea. 
It's also characteristic that the roughness of the seas are not a constant 
but it varies with the wind speed.

If you look at a landscape like this, 

you can see that it's an open landscape with grassland. 
But you can also see that it's quite free so 
the wind can easily blow over the landscape. 
We consider this to have a roughness of about three centimeters. 
In this case, down here, we have farm land. 
We have more vegetation and 
vegetation is very good to drag momentum out of the wind and reduce the wind. 
So we assign this to a roughness of about zero point one meter.
And in this case here, you have many shelter belts or you can have a forest, 
small forest. 
And we think that this has a roughness of about 40 centimeters. 
However, it's characteristic but it's very difficult to estimate the roughness. 
You need very, very careful measurement and 
Therefore it's often better to use predetermined values. 
And here we have an example of the roughness links put out as a table. 
And as can be seen from the table, again we have at the bottom, 
the roughness for the sea, very, very low. 
And we also have, for example, mown grass, bare soil of the order of one
centimeter. 
Shelter belts, again, 40 centimeters.

But we have recently come to the conclusion that the forest can 
have a quite high roughness. 
There's still some discussion about the roughness length of the forest. 
In this case, we have set it to 80 centimeters. 
And it's also characteristic for 
the forest that a dense forest has a lower roughness than a sparse forest, 
and a sparse forest can be up to 1.5 meters in roughness. 
So it's often better, if you don't have really high-quality measurement of 
the wind profile, to 
use Z_0 determined from a table like this.

So this is an example how the wind changes during the day and 
during the night and as function of height. 
Here we have land conditions and you can see that in this case 30 meters we
have, 
as we explained before, low winds speeds during the night. 
It increases during the day, because you have the convection that starts, 
you have the efficient mixing of the energy from above. 
And then during the night it decreases again. 
These are real measurements. 
If we go a little higher at about 50 meters, 
we have the same variation. 
But it's the difference between day and night is low. 
And at about 150 meters in this case, 
which is a rural case, we can see that there's very little 
variation between the wind speed during night and during the day.

And then, it's quite interesting that above that, we have higher wind speeds 
during the night than during the day, and the effect is very strong. 
And we will come back to this effect in a moment. 
This is land conditions. 
Water conditions, 
it's different because over water you don't have the heating of the water and 
the cooling of the water during the night and the heating during the day. 
And therefore you can see that the structure of the wind speed as function 
of height does not have the characteristic pattern as it has over land.

So this is the atmospheric stability that controls a lot of this. 

And here we have an example of the daytime mixed layer. 
It's characteristic that when the sun is shining, you heat up the ground, 
and because you heat up the ground, you create motions in the air. 
The air becomes lighter than the surrounding air, and 
eddies starts. Here near the surface, 
we see that the eddies are very small. 
Basically they scale with the height above ground. 
And they transport heat from the surface and up. 
But then during the day, this transport gets higher and higher. 
And at a certain time, you have the formation of very large eddies 
On the top of this we have so called entrainment zone. 
This is a zone where energy, 
where free air is entrained into the boundary layer. 
The entrainment zone can have various thickness, 
from 10% of the boundary layer height so maybe 20% or even more in the
morning.

So it's characteristic that the convective boundary layer has very, 

very large profile, very efficient mixing. 
And therefore the wind profile because of the efficient mixing becomes 
near constant with height. 
When you get to the entrainment Zone it starts to increase or 
have a characteristic pattern. 
This arrow shows that the air is entrained into the boundary layer. 
During the night it is different, 
here we have a similar schematic picture of the night condition, 
but the height is much less, it's only 300 meters.

And it has in a way three layers you can say. 

First, we look at the temperature profile. 
It increases because the surface is cooling, and 
then it has an area where it's near constant, and then it has an inversion, 
and then it's in the free atmosphere.

So in the blue part, which is very low, close to the surface, 

you can see that we have eddies and they are continuous, but 
they are not very efficient because the momentum force is inhibited from above. 
It's difficult for the eddies to form. 
It's a mainly mechanical turbulent and some gravity waves, 
which is illustrated by the long arrows here. 
Then you have this layer with continuous turbulence. 
Above this you have a layer where turbulence is not continuous, but 
it still exists, and it can come in bursts, and such things. 
And on the top of this layer, you can see you have an inversion or a kind of kink. 
So this is, you have a layer with full turbulence, you have a layer with 
intermittent turbulence and then you have the free atmosphere above. 
So what does a wind profile look here? 
It's completely different from the day time because the wind is very 
small near the surface then it increases and 
it increases very fast in the stable boundary layer and 
it actually here on this, can form a low level jet, and then it starts to decrease. 
Because we have a low level jet here. 
And this is partly the explanation that when you get up to 
about a height of 100 meters, the wind speed during night and 
day are near equal, because you have the formation of low level jets.

So here are some examples of real wind profiles during the day. 
We have low wind on a sunny day, and here, we see that the wind speed is low, 
and near, constant with height, the wind shear. 
The directional shear is also low because of the efficient mixing.
If it's overcast, you're closer to neutral. 
But you still have a low wind, a low directional shear. 
But you have a more pronounced profile,

this is completely different during the night. 

First of all, 
the wind speed increases much more during the night than during the day. 
It's near linear. 
The directional change is much, much bigger than during the day. 
And this is a windy night, Night with a low-level jet. 
You can see the formation of the jet, 
in this case about 300 meters, and a very pronounced directional shear.

So, in summary, What you should have learned 

in this lecture is that the wind profile is logarithmic at high wind speeds. 
The wind speed depends on the surface roughness. 
And winds are different during day and night.

But I should say that the wind speed profile is more complicated than this. 
Because this, in a way, the simplified version. 
It also depends on the height of the boundary layer as we saw on the slides. 
And it also depends on the horizontal temperature gradient in the atmosphere. 
So, large scales effect actually starts to influence wind speed already 
Let’s say, 100 to 200 meters.
 WIND RESOURCE ASSESSMENT

You have a cup anemometer to the right in the picture, 

you want to measure, you want to put up a wind turbine. 
Or you have a wind turbine, but you also have a very complicated terrain. 
You can see to the left you have a water, beach. 
You have an escarpment and then you want to put up the wind turbine somewhere. 
So the question is, how do we do this? 
You want to use the measurements. 
You can see from the mast to the right, you have a very good, 
long-term measurement, but how do they represent the wind where the wind turbine is?

So the worst thing you can do in such a case, 

is you can make a linear interpolation.

In this case, we have a cup anemometer here, we know the wind here, 
we know the wind here. 
So therefore, we know the wind here, and here.

However, the terrain is complicated. 

For example, you have a forest here.

And you can see that when you have a forest, 

the wind speed decreases because of the forest, the high roughness of the forest. 
You have a hill here and over the hill, 
the wind speed increases, at least very close to the hill. 
So here, you have a much higher wind speed than you have 
over the forest and maybe the distance is only a few kilometers. 
The cup anemometer here, is actually placed where there's a house, 
so there's a sheltering effect. 
There's an obstacle here. 
So therefore, the wind speed is actually a little lower than it 
would be if you had a free terrain. 
So in a way, this illustrates very nicely 
how sensitive the wind is to variation in the landscape types.
So in the Wind Atlas Meteorology we use this idea 
that we base the estimates on real measurements. 
But we have developed a way such that we can change. 
So we can transfer the measurement from the meteorological site 
to a side where you, for example, want to put a wind turbine.

And the idea follows what I've just told here, 

that we take in to account the effect of obstacles in this case I 
mentioned that the meteorological measurements were near a house. 
Then we compensate for this in the meteorological measurements, 
then we compensate for the specific roughness 
and then we compensate for the topography in the area. 
In this way we make a generalized wind climate, that means that we take 
the measurements from the real side, and then we clean them in such a way that they
will 
represent a flat terrain with a specified roughness that we can actually specify.

Then we have something we can use. We can go the other way. 

And we can go down, so if we want to predict the wind climate here, 
you can see that the wind climate at the specific place for 
a wind turbine we first takes into account the topography. 
Then we put into the model the roughness of the terrain, 
and then if there are any obstacles. 
And in this way, we have made a model that can be used at a specific place 
that is within the same overall wind climate as the meteorological mast.

So this is an example of the way we take 

into the account the sheltering effect in this model, it's fairly simple. 
It's a parameterized way but you can also see here that the sheltering effect can 
be very big, up to 50%, very close to a building. 
And even thirty obstacles hights, 
you can see the effect of the obstacle there. 
So, this is built into the model and this is the way we compensate for 
the effect of the obstacles being buildings or groups of trees.

So another point is that you have changes of roughness. 

And these changes of roughness means that, 
For example, when the wind goes from the sea over the land. 
When it goes from over the sea to the land, 
in changes the turbulence, and it also changes the wind speed.

And here we have an example where it's illustrated. 

We have the wind profile over the sea. 
Which is almost vertical and then we have a roughness change here.

And here we have a higher roughness, in this case 20 centimeters.

The green area here shows the area where the wind speed is in equilibrium with 
a new surface and also the turbulence is in the equilibrium with the new surface.

The height of this area it increases with roughly one to hundred. 

Then we have another area up here, where actually the wind 
profile is in transition that means that it partly reflects 
the over water condition and partly reflects the surface condition. 
So in this case, we can use Interpolation between the two. 
And above internal boundary layer, actually the wind profile 
is exactly the same as over the water, or almost exactly the same as over the water.

It's very characteristic for this that here, 

in the green area the turbulence is in equilibrium with surface here. 
If you go up here, we have an area where the turbulence is not in equilibrium, 
but the wind profile is in equilibrium with the oversea conditions and 
the interpolation layer here. 
So this was how we treat the roughness changes. 
The third part of the model is that we also treat 
the inhomogeneous terrain, in terms of topography. 
And what is characteristic is that when the wind blows from a flat terrain and 
meets a hill, the stream lines are compressed on the top, 
because of continuity. 
And therefore, the wind will speed up at the top of the hill here. 
Here we have a Idealized example and here we can see how it actually works. 
You have the wind profile over land, at flat terrain. 
And you have plotted the same wind profile, but 
over the hill you have an over-speeding. 
The over-speeding can be quite large, the height 
of the maximum over speeding is connected to the width of the hill. 
So therefore, it's a very good idea, if you want to put up wind turbines, 
to put them on top of the hills, but small hills are not good for 
large wind turbines there has to be a certain 
connection between the size of the wind turbine and the dimensions of the hill. 
But putting up a wind turbine on a hill can give a much higher energy 
production than if you just put it over land.

Here we have an example of a time series of real observations from Denmark.

And we can see at the wind speed at 10 meter is here. 

It's of course lower than the wind speed at 100 meter, 
which is a fairly typical hub height today. 
Maybe the hub height is even higher for some of the new wind turbines. 
And it has a very characteristic daily variation here, 
This represent one specific day, you can see that during night the wind speed 
between 10 meter and 100 meter, the difference is quite big. 
And this has to do with the stability, 
it's pretty sure that during this night there has been a cloud free night, so 
you have a strong cooling of the surface, which inhibit the momentum transfer and 
therefore the wind speed is much lower at 10 meters than at 100 meters. 
During the day, when there are few clouds, 
you have a very pronounced mixing of the whole layer and 
therefore the difference between ten meters and a hundred meters decreases. 
And then its characteristic that when we come to the night here, 
You can see that the difference is not so big which can be an indication that 
actually we likely have clouds developed here, so we have near a neutral wind profile.

So when we do the calculations, we do not really use the individual 

measurements because this will be quite time consuming for the computer. 
It is possible of course. 
But they are put into the Weibull distribution.

This is a typical example of the Weibull distribution. 

You can see it is a quite nice fit to the measurements, but 
it's not a perfect fit to measurements. 
And the Weibull distribution is just chosen for practical reasons because 
it's very easy to do calculations on the Weibull distribution.

So when you have done all these calculations, 

when you have taken care of the obstacles, the roughness, and 
the topography, you can come up with an assessment of the wind energy. 
And here we see an example of the assessment, you can see. 
It's a wind turbines put on a ridge, and the red 
indicates the energy content in the wind that can be produced by the wind turbines. 
And it's clear that it's a good idea to put them on the ridge, here. 
And there is less energy in the wind when you just move a little away from this.

So what did we learn here?

We learned that the wind resource depends on the surface roughness, 

it depends on the topography, and 
it depends on the sheltering by obstacles as the first approximation.

And in the program we use the WASP, all this information 

is represented in digital maps of the wind farm and the neighboring area. 
The map has to be quite big, so it's quite a large job to produce them, 
but it's a very important job to produce these maps.