the times series

This is the third post in the TIMES Series, where we break down everything about Vortex TIMES. In this one, we’ll try to give you insight into “Why we complicated our life by developing this product (instead of simply relying on our standard portfolio)?“: Check out other posts in the series from the table of contents here. 

Vortex Research & Development

At Vortex R&D department (the largest one within the company) we apply a kind of hybrid approach: a mix of creative initiatives that actively intend to anticipate our customers’ demands plus reactions to their feedback afterwards. 

When in active mode, our technical team carefully design features or product characteristics with some future clients’ applications in mind. However, customers are also creative themselves and many times they use our products for unexpected applications. 

Nothing to complain about, their (your) free choices force us to improve.

The time-series vision 

Since many years ago, one of our main aims at Vortex has been contributing to a transition to the analysis in the time domain within the wind resource assessment community. I’m personally convinced of the unavoidability of this change of paradigm in our industry.

In this sense, if you are a Vortex user, you’ll probably be familiar with our time-series products: SERIES and LES. Both SERIES (long-term, lo-res) and LES (short-term, hi-res) are some of our most demanded products what more or less supports such vision of the time-series market shift.

A recurrent demand

Following the active R&D approach, both SERIES and LES were initially designed with some foreseeable clients’ usages in mind. Respectively, SERIES for MCP application and LES for TI analysis. However, soon after their respective launches, our customers started to use them beyond their designed comfort zone.

Outside it both products have their strengths and weaknesses. The latter usually generating recurrent questions and demands from our customers (the former generate also occasional, very much appreciated, congratulations from clients).

For these time-series products, the recurrent demands of our customers were, respectively, “why SERIES cannot have higher resolution?” or “LES longer extension?“. Until very recently, our recurrent answer for both questions has always been an excuse: “the computer power limitations prevents us to offer both long-term and high-resolution at the same time”

But the real answer to those recurrent questions would have been: “we still don’t know how to offer both features together”. Now, with Vortex TIMES, we finally know.