The generation of a wind atlas for South Africa is a joint undertaking between the CSIR, SAWS, CSAG and international collaborators at Risoe, part of the Danish Technical University. The project has been made possible by the Royal Danish Embassy, the United Nations Development Programme, the South African Wind Energy Programme and the South African National Energy Research Institute.
The projects is divided into a number of work packages which include an observations campaign, high resolution as well as microscale modeling, extreme wind climate assessment, wind climate assessment techniques as well as data dissemination. The cumulative objective of these efforts is to generate a very high resolution wind atlas for South Africa to provide stakeholders with knowledge allowing them to make informed decisions.
CSAG, together with Riso in Denmark, is involved in the generation of an accurate mesoscale wind climatology over regions of the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape for the last 30 years. Aspects of this work include sensitivity studies to determine the optimal setup of the model, integration of high resolution surface data into the model, dynamical downscaling, verification of model results against station and satellite data, production of an initial atlas, refinements of the methodology, postprocessing and verification of the model climatology.
Initial model set up and preliminary calculations have been made both at Risø DTU (KAMM) and at UCT (WRF). The KAMM model has been used at Risø DTU to produce the first verified wind atlas across the regions of interest (see figure below). For more information please register on the WASA data site here.
Simulated climatological (30-year) annual mean wind speed (m/s) at 100m above ground level.
For the last two years, the WRF model has been used to generate a two day weather forecast with a focus on wind. The forecast is available online here and is being used to test different model setup for the production of the high resolution 30 year climatology simulation. Work to refine model setup, terrain descriptions, parameterisation schemes and model verification is ongoing using the one year’s worth of observed data.
For more more information about the project please contact Chris Lennard at lennard@csag.uct.ac.za or download the WASA brochure.
