Data From the Coast: Deployment of a Radar Wind Profiler Network to Support Operational Wind Energy Forecasts and WFIP2

As part of an ongoing effort to improve short-term forecasts of wind speed and wind power, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has supported the deployment of three 449 MHz radar wind profilers along the Washington and Oregon coasts. These units, when combined with similar radars deployed by the California Department of Water Resources, will provide a “picket fence” of radar observations along the entire Pacific coast of the United States with a spacing of approximately 250 km between field sites. Data collected by the systems include profiles of wind speed and direction to an altitude of 6 to 8 km, and virtual temperature to an altitude of approximately 2 km (depending on conditions). The project team, including members from both DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, have deployed radars at Coos Bay, OR; Astoria, OR; and Forks, WA. Hourly data from the instruments will be made available to weather forecasters, wind energy producers, and other users in near-real time and archived in the DOE Data Archive and Portal. These locations also mark the western extent of the study domain utilized by DOE's second Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2). Data from these systems will be used in the context of that study to help improve boundary-layer parameterizations applied in regional scale models. This presentation will include a description of the new network as well as preliminary results from the radar wind profilers.