Vortex has developed a one-year rolling methodology to provide long-term wind data for LES and BLOCKS simulations.
Typically, the wind industry uses clustering solutions to reduce computational costs. However, Vortex’s approach differs by delivering continuous 10-minute and 30-minute time series for a one-year period. To determine the optimal representative one-year window, Vortex calculates a 3km horizontal resolution time series covering 20 years and derives statistics such as global and seasonal wind speeds, as well as wind speed and direction distributions.
By comparing these statistics between the full period and each one-year subset, moving this window in one-day steps, Vortex selects the one-year window that minimizes, overall, the anomalies. The selected one-year period is used to run LES or BLOCKS and provide a full period of 365 consecutive days that is representative of the long term at the site.
This methodology has been upgraded to enhance accuracy, considering intra-annual variability and utilizing weighted mean squared error (WMSE) to adjust wind speed and direction distributions, rather than solely performing a Weibull fit. A comparison between the previous version, the new version, and the long-term time series (Vortex SERIES) is provided as an example.
The validation results indicate significant improvements in the accuracy of Vortex’s One-year Rolling Method. The updated methodology allows for a slight increase in the annual absolute anomaly to better align with seasonal mean wind speeds and wind distributions. As observed, it substantially reduces the seasonal absolute anomaly, surpassing the previous algorithm’s results in 60% of cases. The same trend is observed for the wind speed and direction distributions, minimizing their mean WMSE and standard deviations (yielding improved results in 66% and 79% of cases, respectively).
Therefore, Vortex’s updated approach outperforms the previous version for the majority of validated sites, both in terms of wind speed and wind direction distribution adjustments. These findings demonstrate that the representative one-year windows selected by the new methodology better align with long-term wind patterns. Overall, the validation supports the effectiveness and reliability of Vortex’s enhanced One-year Rolling Method.
Download here the full document: https://vortexfdc.com/resources/improved-one-year-rolling-methodology/
Modeled wind resource data for the wind industry.
At any site around the world. Onshore and offshore.