EOLMAP: A web tool to assess the wind resource over Spain

Abstract

A wind data base and a web tool have been developed to estimate the wind power over the Iberian Peninsula (IP). This tool also allows estimating the most appropriate Small Wind Turbine (SWT) for a given location. The wind database includes observational and simulated wind data. The simulated data consists on a 10 km hindcast, covering the period 1960-2007, generated with a Regional Climate Model (RCM) driven by ERA40. The observational data base has been built from hourly records encompassing the period 1999-2007 and includes more than 450 stations evenly distributed over Spain. A quality control has been applied to the data in order to assess the reliability of the observational data set. Although the web tool provides information which allows the users to estimate the reliability of the modelled data in the location of the interest, a previous general validation of the simulation has been performed. This previous validation indicates that most of the disagreements between simulation and observations are attributable to the too coarse spatial resolution of the regional model.