Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit

The Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit can be accessed from NREL's high-performance computing system.

Data Development

This wind resource data for North America was produced using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). The WRF model was initialized with the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts Interim Reanalysis (ERA-Interm) data set with an initial grid spacing of 54 kilometers (km). Three internal nested domains were used to refine the spatial resolution to 18, 6, and finally 2 km.

The WRF model was run for years 2007 to 2014. While outputs were extracted from WRF at 5-minute time-steps, due to storage limitations instantaneous hourly time-step are provided for all variables while full 5-minute resolution data is provided for wind speed and wind direction only.

Data Variables

The following variables were extracted from the WRF model data:

Wind speed at 10, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 200 meters (m)
Wind direction at 10, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 200 m
Temperature at 2, 10, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 200 m
Pressure at 0, 100, 200 m
Surface precipitation rate
Surface relative humidity
Inverse monin obukhov length.

Domains

The wind resource was produce using three distinct WRF domains shown below. The CONUS domain for 2007-2013 was run by 3Tier while 2014 as well as all years of the Canada and Mexico domains were run under NARIS. The data is provided in three sets of files:

CONUS: extracted exclusively from the CONUS domain
Canada: combined data from the Canada and CONUS domains
Mexico: combined data from the Mexico and CONUS domains.

Data Format

The data are provided in high density data file (.h5) separated by year. The variables mentioned above are provided in two-dimensional, time-series arrays with dimensions (time x location). The temporal axis is defined by the 'time_index' data set, while the positional axis is defined by the 'meta' data set. For storage efficiency each variable has been scaled and stored as an integer. The scale-factor is provided in the 'scale-factor' attribute. The units for the variable data is also provided as an attribute ('units').

Directory Structure

Wind resource data are made available as a series of hourly .h5 files corresponding to each domain and year. Five minute wind data (wind speed and direction) is stored in .h5 files by domain, year, and hub height. Below is an example of the directory structure for the CONUS domains:

/datasets/WIND/conus -> root directory for the conus domain
/v1.0.0 -> version 1 of the data corresponding to years 2007-2013, run by 3Tier
/wtk_conus_${year}.h5 -> hourly data for all variables for the given year
/${year}/wind_${hub_height}.h5 -> 5-minute wind resource data for the given year and hub height
/v1.1.0 -> version 1.1 of the data corresponding to 2014, run under NARIS with an updated version of WRF and new Boundary Layer Physics (PBL scheme).

Cite the Data

Users of the WIND Toolkit should use the following citations:

Draxl, C., B.M. Hodge, A. Clifton, and J. McCaa. 2015. Overview and Meteorological Validation of the Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit (Technical Report, NREL/TP-5000-61740). Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Draxl, C., B.M. Hodge, A. Clifton, and J. McCaa. 2015. "The Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit." Applied Energy 151: 355366.

Lieberman-Cribbin, W., C. Draxl, and A. Clifton. 2014. Guide to Using the WIND Toolkit Validation Code (Technical Report, NREL/TP-5000-62595). Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

King, J., A. Clifton, and B.M. Hodge. 2014. Validation of Power Output for the WIND Toolkit (Technical Report, NREL/TP-5D00-61714). Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory.