Ametereological consulting firm based at the Barcelona Science Park – has developed a new database containing details on past weather conditions which provides a spatial and temporal representation of a much higher quality than that of other world weather databases currently used in this field. The tool known as WindTrends, has already been commercialised and is being officially presented today at the European Wind Energy Conference and Exhibition (EWEC), an international exhibition where representatives from official administrations and the business community converge to debate on the challenges and future perspectives foreseen in the field of wind energy development and exploitation.

Windtrends was created using the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) databases – which contain data on the weather conditions recorded worlwide over the past twenty years– and the Mesoscale Atmospheric Simulation System (MASS). MASS is a numerical model that operates under any weather condition and that requires computers with a powerful calculation capacity. The system provides a snapshot of atmospheric conditions at any point in the area chosen and at different time points in the future. This model can function with great accuracy in sections few kilometers apart if it is provided with additional data on ground characteristics (orography, vegetations, etc.) of all Europe.

The main advantages of Windtrends against other prediction simulation models is that Windtrens operates with data extracted from stations in a regular grid with points every 20 km – whilst in other global models, data extraction stations are locatet at t 100 km apart. This close range grid allows the availability of more accurate weather data locally, which take into consideration the orography of these smaller areas and other variables controlling local winds. In addition, it provides a snapshot of atmospherical conditions on an hourly basis whilst in other world models, data are usually collected every six hours,– providing a total of nearly 100,000 data records for each height and point.

Included in each record are variables such as wind speed, direction, temperature, pressure, humidity, and density for each height and point in the European and North American contorminious. This technology enables WindTrends to provide complete hourly data sets for every point on wind, temperature, humidity and pressure spanning for tweelve years within the range of the area covered in the database.

To confirm the validity of the records taken by this system, data are compared against the data provided by real observations of atmospheric conditions (weather towers , radars, radioultrasound), which in the case of WindTrends have demonstrated to be highly representative.

The model allows to forecast weather conditions of any country in Europe over the last ten years, spanning from 1997 to 2009. ” We have not wanted to older weather recoords in order to provide records of maximum reliability”, explained Santi Parés, Commercial Director of MeteosimTruewind–, even though the system is capable of providing even older records, the recording of these data has not always been done in a homoeneous fashion, and it is possible that this lack of homogenity might have drawn accuracy to the rest of the data”, added Mr. Parés.

WindTrends is geared towards companies in the wind energy sector allowing these companies to forecast variability of wind resources, to understand profitability variations in projects already underway, to study historical weather conditions or to determine the number of freezing hours that a certain location or region has had in the last twelve years, among many other applications.