14-year WRF simulation of wind resources over Ecuador's mainland and the Galapagos Islands

Project: Mesoscale modeling of wind resources over Ecuador using WRF - The optimal planning of wind energy capacity expansion in the complex terrain of Ecuador requires reliable meteorological datasets. However, a review of existing datasets revealed a lack of adequate, long-term, and validated wind datasets with sufficient spatial and temporal resolution for the country.
The main goal of this project was to generate a long-term and high-resolved wind resource dataset over Ecuador’s mainland and the Galapagos Islands using numerical weather prediction models. For this purpose, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model forced by initial and boundary conditions from ERA5 reanalysis data was used to generate 14 years (2005-2018) of gridded meteorological data.
This project contains hourly data of wind speed, wind direction, and wind power density at a 3 km grid spacing covering Ecuador’s mainland and the Galapagos Islands. The wind dataset presented in this project provides the basis for further research in energy system modeling and planning.
Summary: The wind dataset was produced using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, version 4.0.2. The model spatial configuration comprises one outer coarse-resolution domain at 9 km (d01) and two nested domains at 3 km (d02 and d03) horizontal spatial gridding. The domains d02 and d03 cover the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador’s mainland, respectively. The physics parametrization schemes follow the model configuration used for the production of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA). The initial and boundary conditions for the WRF simulations were obtained from ERA5 reanalysis data. The simulations were performed month by month for the 14-year period. Each month was split into four runs and a 24-hour spin-up period was added at the beginning of each run. The post-processing of the WRF simulations follows the procedure described in Dörenkämper et al. (2020).
The data provided here comprises hourly values from 00:00 UTC 01-01-2005 to 23:00 UTC 31-12-2018 of wind speed, wind direction and wind power density at seven vertical levels (30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 100 m above ground level).

Note:
The NetCDF files of this dataset were packed to reduce the data volume. To unpack the packed variables, please use the operator "unpack" in CDO.

Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Jonathan Chu, Martin Dörenkämper, and the NEWA team for their assistance on the configuration of the WRF model. Thanks to the High-Performance Computing Team from the University of Oldenburg for their computing facilities.