Two methods in improving onshore wind forecast

Two different methods based on Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) have been employed to improve the onshore wind forecast in an wind farm in north China. One uses hybrid data assimilation (HDA) and the other one employs different domain setup strategy. In an area of Hebei province of north China, due to the specific climatic background it is a great challenge to accurately forecast the wind in that area. The Global Forecast System(GFS) data have been used in the assimilation process and a much larger domain has been tested in order to better capture the influence of synoptic scale systems. The period for testing is March 2013. It has been found that HDA methods significantly improve the performance of the forecast, in particular for the first 12 hours. For the strategy using alternative domain configuration, it has limited positive effect. The advantage of HDA application in meso-scale weather forecast has been verified.