Spatio-temporal model for wind speed variability

Journal article, 2015

Investments in wind energy harvesting facilities are often high. At the same time uncertainties for the corresponding energy gains are large. Therefore a reliable model to describe the variability of wind speed is needed to estimate the expected available wind power and other statistics of interest, e.g. coefficient of variation, expected length of the wind conditions favorable for the wind-energy harvesting etc. In this paper wind speed are modeled by means of a spatio-temporal transformed Gaussian field. Its dependence structure is localized by introduction of time and space dependent parameters in the field. The model has the advantage of having a relatively small number of parameters. These parameters have natural physical interpretation and are statistically fitted to represent variability of observed wind speed in ERA Interim reanalysis data set.