Correlation-Based Temporal Correction of WRF Wind Fields Using Offshore Measurements for Nearshore Wind Resource Assessment

Accurate wind estimation is essential for wind resource assessment. In this study, using scanning lidar measurements and high-resolution WRF simulations from two nearshore areas in Japan, we developed two extensions of the Temporal Correction (TC) method, which corrects wind fields generated by the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using on-site measurements. First, when using a single measurement point for correction, we derived two empirical formulas to predict appropriate correction coefficients based on reference–target correlation coefficients of wind speed obtained from WRF simulations and developed a method (TC-pred) using these formulas. TC-pred was shown to have higher wind speed estimation accuracy and a broader range of applicability than the conventional TC method. Next, we extended the TC-pred method to allow the use of multiple measurement points as references by introducing a weighting formula for each reference point. Wind speed estimation accuracy improved as the number of reference points increased, primarily because the probability of including reference points with high reference–target correlation coefficients increased. This suggests that it is effective for the suppression of wind estimation uncertainty to determine measurement layout such that the correlation coefficient between at least one reference point and each target point in the target area exceeds a certain value.