Evaluation of the Impact of Uniform and Non-Uniform Resolution Implementations in Numerical Weather Prediction Models over the Accuracy of Short-Term Wind Prediction

The increasing integration of renewable energy resources to the national grids necessitatesaccurate prediction of power generation from those sources in terms of secure operation ofelectricity grid system and energy trading. Electricity generation of renewable energy powerplants such as wind and solar are inherently affected by weather conditions. The wind conditionparticularly is affected by surface characteristics such as orography and vegetation, therefore it isthe one of the near surface atmospheric variables having the strongest local variability. The high-resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models are utilized to take the local conditionsinto account. WRF model is the one of the most common NWP models having been widelyinvestigated by various researchers. On the other hand, The Model for Prediction Across Scales(MPAS) is a relatively new NWP model utilizing non-uniform mesh structures, developed by theNational Center for Environmental Predictions (NCEP). However, there are limited studies in theliterature which compare the prediction performance of WRF and MPAS model in terms ofsurface wind speed. This study evaluates the prediction accuracy of near surface wind of twodownscaled NWP models namely, WRF-ARW and MPAS. Both models are configured withalmost identical physics suites and initialized with 3 hourly 00-UTC initialization of GlobalForecast System (GFS) data. The model outputs are obtained at 10 minutes interval for 48 hourshorizon. Hourly averaged model results are compared with observations from 104 on-sitemeteorological stations located in Turkiye having different complexity in terms of correlationcoefficient and RMSE.