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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Making of the New European Wind Atlas - Part 2: production and evaluation

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This is the second of two papers that document the creation of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA). In Part 1, we described the sensitivity experiments and accompanying evaluation done to arrive at the final mesoscale model setup used to produce the mesoscale wind atlas. In this paper, Part 2, we document how we made the final wind atlas product, covering both the production of the mesoscale climatology generated with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and the microscale climatology generated with the Wind Atlas Analysis and Applications Program (WAsP). The paper includes a detailed description of the technical and practical aspects that went into running the mesoscale simulations and the downscaling using WAsP. We show the main results from the final wind atlas and present a comprehensive evaluation of each component of the NEWA model chain using observations from a large set of tall masts located all over Europe. The added value of the WRF and WAsP downscaling of wind climatologies is evaluated relative to the performance of the driving ERA5 reanalysis and shows that the WRF downscaling reduces the mean wind speed bias and spread relative to that of ERA5 from −1.50±1.30 to 0.02±0.78 m s−1. The WAsP downscaling has an added positive impact relative to that of the WRF model in simple terrain. In complex terrain, where the assumptions of the linearized flow model break down, both the mean bias and spread in wind speed are worse than those from the raw mesoscale results. The European Commission (EC) partly funded NEWA (NEWA – New European Wind Atlas) through FP7 (topic FP7-ENERGY.2013.10.1.2). The authors of this paper acknowledge the support from the Federal Ministry for the Economic Affairs and Energy, on the basis of the decision by the German Bundestag (grant no. 0325832A/B); the Danish Energy Authority (EUDP 14-II, 64014-0590); Latvijas Zinatnu Akademija (Latvia – grant no. Z/16/1397); the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain; grant nos. PCIN-2014-017-C07-03, PCIN-2016-176, PCIN-2014-017-C07-04, PCIN-2016-009, PCIN-2014-013-C07-04, and PCIN-2016-080); the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (grant no. 215M386). Mariano Sastre-Marugán additionally acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte through the “José Castillejo” Fellowship (grant no. CAS18/00316). Peer Reviewed "Article signat per 18 autors/es: Martin Dörenkämper, Bjarke T. Olsen, Björn Witha, Andrea N. Hahmann, Neil N. Davis, Jordi Barcons, Yasemin Ezber, Elena García-Bustamante, J. Fidel González-Rouco, Jorge Navarro, Mariano Sastre-Marugán, Tija Sīle, Wilke Trei, Mark Žagar, Jake Badger, Julia Gottschall, Javier Sanz Rodrigo, and Jakob Mann "