MM5-WASP COUPLING FOR EYA IN COMPLEX TOPOGRAPHICAL AND METEOROLOGICAL

CONDITIONS: THE CASE OF LAKE TURKANA (KENYA) 300 MW WIND FARM

L. Claveri, M. Burlando*, F. Durante*

German Wind Energy Institute (DEWI), Wilhelmshaven, Germany
*DEWI Italy, Genoa, Italy

Summary

The Lake Turkana wind farm site is located approximately 130 km west of the town Marsabit and 15 km east of
Lake Turkana, in the region of the Chalbi desert (Kenya). This is a slightly hilly desert area, mainly characterised
by barren soil with scarce vegetation. Despite the rather simple topography of the area where the wind farm is
planned, the surroundings of the wind farm turn out to be of very high complexity both from the topographical and
meteorological point of view. The wind climate which characterises the wind farm area is indeed strongly
influenced by two factors: the synoptic-scale meteorology of the Eastern African continent, and the presence of
the orographical forcing due to the Kenya highlands.
In order to take into account these synoptic meteorological and orographical forcing, as well as the frictional
effects of the local scale topography and roughness on the wind flows within the wind farm area, a methodology
based on the coupling of the mesoscale meteorological model MM5 with the local-scale model WAsP has been
used in the present investigation. The coupling between the two models is performed following a statistical
approach.
This methodology is compared with the application of WAsP as a stand-alone model. It is shown that the MM5-
WAsP coupling is able to capture qualitatively the strong wind gradient that exists from the south-eastern to the
north-western part of the wind farm area, even if only three over ten anemometric stations are used. On the
contrary, this gradient is correctly represented by WAsP in the stand-alone configuration only if all the stations are
used. This also suggests that, in case of large wind farm areas where large-scale meteorological phenomena
could occur and strongly influence the wind climatology, it would be profitable to perform a preliminary numerical
evaluation of the main wind gradients before installing all the anemometric masts, in order to properly locate the
masts along these gradients and reduce as much as possible the number of stations.

1. Introduction zones. The low-level Turkana jet stream [3], which

The Lake Turkana wind farm is one of the largest
wind farm projects to be realised in the African
Continent, and the first of its kind in Kenya. After its
fully commissioning in 2012, the wind farm will be
generating 300 MW of clean power almost steadily
thanks to the very peculiar characteristics of the
wind climate of north-western Kenya.
The project consists of building 365 wind turbines
Vestas V52 of hub height 45 m and nominal power
850 kW. It is also included reinforcing 200 km of
roads and bridges to transport the wind turbines
from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to the
north-western Kenya, and adding more than 400 km
of transmission lines and several substations to
connect the wind farm and supply power to the
national electric grid.
The wind farm area is almost unique over the world
from the meteorological and geographical point of
view, because the winds sweeping this region start
something like 500 km far east in the Indian Ocean
and are channelled through the “Turkana-Marsabit
Corridor” created by Ethiopian and Kenyan
highlands. This behaviour is due to the fact that the
wind climate of Kenya is mainly subject to two
monsoonal regimes, known as East African
Monsoons [1,2], which are responsible for the
seasonal weather conditions over the country.
These synoptic-scale circulations interact with the
local orography to generate some convergence
blows steadily during the whole year in the low
elevation region of the Turkana-Marsabit Corridor,
occurs in one of the most interesting (for wind
energy exploitation) of these convergence zones.
The commonly adopted approaches for wind energy
yield assessment are expected to fail in this
particular context as they are thought to be applied
over rather small wind farm areas and forced
through the local-scale climatology measured by
anemometric masts. On the contrary, the
methodology needed to manage this kind of
complexity should be able to capture the synoptic
meteorological and orographical forcing, as well as
the frictional effects of the local scale topography
and roughness on the wind flows within the wind
farm area. In order to verify whether the large-scale
forcing is really important or not, a comparison
between two different methodologies to calculate
wind fields has been performed. Firstly, WAsP has
been applied as a stand-alone model (WAsP-SA
hereafter); then, WAsP has been coupled to the
meteorological model MM5 (MM5-WAsP hereafter).
2. Wind climatology of the Lake Turkana
From a climatological point of view, Kenya lies in
one of the most complex regions of the African
continent. Its synoptic-scale climate is mainly
influenced by the superposition of the Inter Tropical
Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which moves south and
north of the equator following the seasons, and the
thermal-driven circulation associated to the East
African monsoons, mainly occurring over Kenya,
Tanzania, and Uganda. A semi-permanent low
pressure cell centred over Lake Victoria forces the
main air-streams of both the monsoons, which are
roughly parallel to the coastline over eastern Kenya,
to flow zonally westward over north-western Kenya,
as shown in Figure 1. This thermally-induced
synoptic-scale deflection interacts with the
orography of Eastern Africa to generate some
convergence zones over the Ethiopian and Kenyan
highlands. Just in between the Ethiopian and
Kenyan highlands, the Turkana-Marsabit Corridor
occurs, which is one of the windiest among these
convergence zones.
km east of the Lake Turkana in the region of the
Chalbi desert in Kenya, between Mount Kulal to the
north and Mount Nyiru to the south (both almost
2500 m). The wind farm area extends 19 km in
latitude and 15 km in longitude over a slightly hilly
territory, with elevations ranging between 700 m and
900 m above the sea level.
At the site, ten anemometric masts are now
available. Three of theme have been installed in
2008 and have been measuring for more than two
years. The other seven masts have been installed
more recently, less than one year ago. Figure 2
shows the position of the anemometric masts within
the wind farm area. The height of the top
anemometer of the masts range between 38 m and
53 m, according to the hub height of the planned
wind turbines that should be 45 m.

MM367
284000

282000
980

MM264
940
280000 MM365
Latitude (m) - UTM WGS84 Zone 37

Height above sea level (m)

900

278000
MM369
860
MM368
276000
MM370 820

780
MM265
274000
740
MM263
700
272000

Fig. 1 Schematic model of the flowat the entrance of MM371 660

the Turkana-Marsabit Corridor during (a) northern 270000

MM364 620
summer and (b) northern winter (after Kinuthia and
Asnani, 1982). 268000

Firstly, [3] and [4] observed the presence of the so-
called Turkana low-level jet stream in this channel.
They associated the presence of this jet, which flows
steadily during both summer and winter monsoons
and partially disappears only during intermediate
seasons, to the branch of the monsoons that enters
the Turkana channel and intensifies into the Turkana
easterly low-level jet.
More recently, Indeje et al. [5] simulated the
dynamics of the Turkana low-level jet and
investigated the role of different forcing factors in
order to understand the kinematics of the jet. They
found that the orographic forcing is the most
important mechanism responsible for sustaining the
jet, the large-scale monsoon background flow is
important in determining the wind speed and jet
cores, and the depth of the channel influences the
vertical structure and location of the jet cores.
Finally, they state that the frictional forcing at the
surface plays a role equivalent to that of the large-
scale monsoonal background winds in the formation
and maintenance of the jet.
3. Wind farm area and measurements
The wind farm site Lake Turkana is located
approximately 130 km west of the town Marsabit, 15
250000 252000 254000 256000 258000 260000 262000 264000
Longitude (m) - UTM WGS84 Zone 37
Fig. 2 Orography of the wind farm area and position
of the ten anemometric masts: stations installed in
2008 (red) and in 2010 (green).
All measurements have been extended to a 3-year
period by means of an MCP procedure with a
medium-term anemometric station located
approximately 25 km northwest of the wind farm
area. Then, the extended data sets have been
corrected to the long-term average with
NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data, in order to decrease
the influence of year-to-year wind variations on the
short-term statistics.
4. Simulation setup and model coupling
In the present paper two different models have been
used to claculate the energy yield assessment of the
Lake Turkana wind farm, namely the mesoscale
meteorological model MM5 and the diagnostic
model WAsP. Meteorological models are general-
purpose models and, in principle, they can be used
for whatever problem concerning atmospheric
physics. They are not specific, however, for wind
energy applications and the maximum resolution
they can manage is of the order of one kilometre in
their non-hydrostatic versions. For wind energy
applications specific post-processing tools are
needed and higher resolution are usually required.
For this reason, MM5 has been used coupled with
the local-scale model WAsP in order to achieve the
required resolution and post-processed output.
4.1 Meteorological model MM5
MM5 is a numerical weather prediction model
developed by the Pennsylvania State University and
National Center for Atmospheric Research
(PSU/NCAR) with the ability to simulate atmospheric
conditions with resolutions ranging from 100 to 1 km.
MM5 Version 3 [6] is a non-hydrostatic, prognostic
model with explicit description of pressure,
momentum and temperature.
MM5 requires a number of input data, in terms of
initial and boundary conditions, to simulate the
evolution of the atmosphere. These conditions
concern both the geometry of the computational
domains and the state of the atmosphere, described
trough the independent variables of the system.
Elevation and vegetation cover derive from different
datasets, appropriately re-gridded to meet the
resolution of the computational domains. The
meteorological initial and boundary conditions used
for the simulations were the National Center for
Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Final Analyses
(FNL). This data is provided by NCEP in GRIB
format with a resolution of 1 × 1 degrees for the
period from 2000 to present. FNL analyses are
produced trough the combination of the Global Data
Assimilation System (GDAS) and the general
circulation model AVN/GFS.
MM5 simulations have been performed over four
two-way nested domains with increasing resolution,
from 27 km to 1 km. MM5 setup is similar to that
used by [7]. A total number of 122 simulations have
been carried on for the period from 2009-01-01 to
2009-12-31. Each run consists of a hindcast of 78
hours, with 6 hours of spin-up period in order to
allow the model to develop high-resolution features
over the inner domains. Also, the model’s solution is
nudged towards the analysis in the outer coarser
domain at each time step.
4.2 Meteorological model
For the local-scale simulations, the computational
model Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program
(WAsP), developed by the Wind Energy Division at
Risø DTU, has been used. This is a program for the
vertical and horizontal extrapolation of wind climate
statistics [8]. It contains several models to describe
wind flow over different terrains and close to
sheltering obstacles. WAsP utilises the linear BZ-
model (Bessel expansion on a Zooming grid) of [9]
to calculate the wind velocity perturbations induced
by orographic features such as single hills or more
complex terrain. The basic theory behind the model
assumes the upstream wind speed to vary
logarithmically with height, and flow perturbations
introduced by the complex terrain are treated as
small perturbations on the basic state wind profile.
According to [10], WAsP is mainly a wind climate
model, and it is certainly the most widely used tool
for wind energy resource assessment. In a standard
project, a time series of wind measurements is firstly
analysed to provide statistical summary of the
observed, site specific wind climate. Then, the
analysed wind data can be converted into a wind
atlas data set or regional wind climate.
4.3 MM5-WAsP coupling
The coupling between the meteorological model and
WAsP is performed following a statistical approach
based on two steps. Firstly, a number of joint
probability distributions of the wind speed and
direction evenly spaced over the whole wind farm
area are obtained from the mesoscale model, and
calibrated with the wind measurements at the
available anemometric stations. Secondly, the local
model WAsP is applied with the aforementioned
probability distributions as information for the wind
climate over the wind farm area. This kind of
approach allows evaluating the wind gradients
induced by the large-scale meteorological and
topographical forcing, which could exist within the
wind farm area.
WAsP-SA (three masts)
264 264
MM5-WAsP
265 265
263 263
367
264
WAsP-SA (ten masts)
365
369
370
368
265
263
371
364
Fig. 3 Mean wind field at 45 m a.g.l. calculated
through three different methods: WAsP-SA (top left)
and MM5-WAsP (top right) forced by 3 masts, and
WAsP-SA forced by 10 masts. The color scale is
the same for all the maps.
5. Comparison between the mean wind fields
obtained with WAsP-SA and MM5-WAsP
Two approaches have been used in order to verify
how important is the large-scale forcing in evaluating
the wind fields over the Lake Turkana wind farm
area. The first approach is based on using WAsP
forced through the wind climate of only three over
ten anemometric masts, namely the three masts
MM263, MM264, and MM265, which have been
installed in 2008 (method 1). The second approach
is based on coupling MM5 with WAsP by means of
the approach described in Section 4.3 (method 2).
Also in this case, only the aforementioned three
masts have been used. The results of these two
methods have been compared to the results
obtained using WAsP forced through the wind
climate of all the ten available anemometric masts,
as this is considered our best estimate of the real
wind fields, at least for the areas where the results
are not only a WAsP extrapolation (method 3).
WAsP-SA (three masts)
264
265
263
367
264
WAsP-SA (ten masts)
365
369
370
368
370
265
263
371
364
MM5-WAsP (three masts)
264
265
263
Fig. 4 Polynomial regressions of order 1 (left) and
3 (right) of the mean wind field maps in Figure 4.
Figure 3 shows the mean wind field calculated at the
hub height of 45 m a.g.l. with the three independent
methods. The greatest difference between methods
1 and 2 is the presence of quite a strong wind
gradient from south-east to north-west in the MM5-
WasP map. This gradient seems to be confirmed by
method 3, even if in this case the gradient seems
lower.
In order to have a deeper understanding of the
structure of the maps shown in Figure 3, the main
trends of these maps have been analysed by fitting
the maps with a polynomial regression of order 1
(planar surface) and of order 3 (cubic surface). The
results of these regressions are shown in Figure 4.
The polynomial regressions of order 1 (left) clearly
show that the wind gradient is enhanced with
method 2 with respect to method 3, but also that it is
very low and reversed with method 1. The
polynomial regressions of order 3, which retain more
information from the original maps, depict also a
wind gradient towards south-west and north with
method 2. These secondary gradients are not
present with method 3, whereas method 1 shows
again a reversed gradient. It is worth noting,
however, that in this case it is not possible to state
exactly whether method 3 produces a more reliable
gradient than method 2 as these secondary
gradients are outside the area where the masts are
located. In the MM5 output, there is also some
evidence that an hydraulic jump occurs in the lee of
mount Kulal, so that the wind gradient to the north
264
could really exist.
265 6. Conclusions
263
The present investigation mainly suggests that,
when a project extends over a wide area and large-
scale meteorological or topographical forcing can
occur, it could be profitable to perform a certain
367
number of numerical simulations and analyses
before installing the complete set of anemometric
264 masts. A meteorological model, indeed, could be of
365
369
help to identify the main wind gradients from a
368
qualitatively point of view, so that the positioning and
265
setup of the anemometric masts could be done a
263
posteriori in a more reliable and efficient way.
371
364
7. References
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Low-Level Cross-equatorial Jet Stream of the
Western Indian Ocean. Pure Appl. Geophys. 115,
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1251–1262.
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Low Level Jet Stream. Pure Appl. Geophys. 115,
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1263–1282.
263
[3] Kinuthia J.H., and G.C. Asnani (1982) A Newly
Found Jet in North Kenya (Turkana Channel). Mon.
Wea. Rev. 110, 1722–1728.
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