Publications

Salvação, N., Bernardino, M. and Guedes Soares, C. (2014), “Assessing mesoscale wind simulations in different environments”, Computers & Geosciences, Vol. 71, pp. 28-36

This work discusses the accuracy of wind speeds simulated by several mesoscale meteorological models. The performance of the WRF model is evaluated by comparisons with measured data and with results of other models. In order to do that, the WRF model is implemented on a region that includes Portugal and a portion of the North-Western Atlantic Ocean, where the MM5 model has been operationally forecasting wind speeds since 2008. Simulations from two other models implemented in the ECMWF and in the Portuguese Meteorological Institute are also evaluated. A comparison between the results WRF and MM5 is performed, using the same physic and dynamic numerical options for the simulations as well as the same input data. An objective verification of the numerical predictions against measured data is performed to evaluate the model accuracy using wind data from 11 stations located within the study area. The simulation by WRF, of an extreme wind event observed in three locations is also investigated. In order to verify the impact of the use of higher quality data, the reanalysis data ERA-interim is used as input to the WRF model and the comparisons are made for two domains (38 and 12 km). The results indicate an overall good performance of all the models in simulating wind speeds, including our model of interest WRF demonstrating that the model can be a useful tool in forecasting wind speeds in those areas, replacing the old discontinued model MM5.

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