After a decade of rising costs and technical challenges, project financial data indicates that offshore wind may finally be on a downward cost trajectory while the industry logged its best deployment year ever in 2015. Historically, rising offshore wind costs have been attributed to a myriad of hindrances, including increasing siting challenges (e.g., deeper water, greater distances from shore) and a wide range of installation and operational difficulties that have frustrated developers and offset gains made in technology, learning, and experience. The resilience of the European offshore wind industry to overcome these daunting cost challenges can be attributed to stable European policy commitments, the introduction of new offshore-class turbine and substructure technologies, and the creation of an offshore wind industry supply chain.

A newly developed technique for airborne dual-Doppler observations with the Wyoming Cloud Radar is used to characterize the velocity fields in vertical planes across cumulus turrets. The clouds sampled were continental in nature, with high bases (near 0°C) and with depths of 2–3 km. Clear evidence was found that the clouds evolved through sequences of bubbles, or thermals, with well-defined toroidal circulations, or vortex rings. The ring core and tube diameters were about 200–600 m, leading to turret sizes of 1–2 km in the horizontal. The largest updraft speeds were observed in the ring centers, but regions of turbulent, ascending air extended behind the thermals to distances comparable with the toroid sizes. Vertical shear of ambient winds, when present, led to a tilting of the updrafts and toroids. Patterns in the reflectivity and velocity fields indicated regions of major intrusions into the thermals, accompanied by entrainment of ambient air, or recycling of larger hydrometeors, depending on their location. In addition, at the upper cloud/environment interface, instability nodes contributed to further entrapment of cloud-free air. The observations presented in this paper constitute clear demonstrations and quantitative characterization of vortical circulations in growing cumulus turrets; they should provide a more reliable basis for the assessment of simulations and of model parameterizations.

In the afternoon of 24 May 2002, a well-defined and frontogenetic cold front moved through the Texas panhandle. Detailed observations from a series of platforms were collected near the triple point between this cold front and a dryline boundary. This paper primarily uses reflectivity and Doppler velocity data from an airborne 95-GHz radar, as well as flight-level thermodynamic data, to describe the vertical structure of the cold front as it intersected with the dryline. The prefrontal convective boundary layer was weakly capped, weakly sheared, and about 2.5 times deeper than the cold-frontal density current. The radar data depict the cold front as a fine example of an atmospheric density current at unprecedented detail (∼40 m). The echo structure and dual-Doppler-inferred airflow in the vertical plane reveal typical features such as a nose, a head, a rear-inflow current, and a broad current of rising prefrontal air that feeds the accelerating front-to-rear current over the head. The 2D cross-frontal structure, including the frontal slope, is highly variable in time or alongfront distance. Along this slope horizontal vorticity, averaging ∼0.05 s−1, is generated baroclinically, and the associated strong cross-front shear triggers Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) billows at the density interface. Some KH billows occupy much of the depth of the density current, possibly even temporarily cutting off the head from its trailing body.

Blade element momentum methods, though conceptually simple, are highly useful for analyzing wind turbines aerodynamics and are widely used in many design and analysis applications. A new version of AeroDyn is being developed to take advantage of new robust solution methodologies, conform to a new modularization framework for National Renewable Energy Laboratory's FAST, utilize advanced skewed-wake analysis methods, fix limitations with previous implementations, and to enable modeling of highly flexible and nonstraight blades. This paper reviews blade element momentum theory and several of the options available for analyzing skewed inflow. AeroDyn implementation details are described for the benefit of users and developers. These new options are compared to solutions from the previous version of AeroDyn and to experimental data. Finally, recommendations are given on how one might select from the various available solution approaches.

Offshore wind energy development is underway in the U.S., with proposed sites located in hurricane‐prone regions. Turbine design criteria outlined by the International Electrotechnical Commission do not encompass the extreme wind speeds and directional shifts of hurricanes stronger than category 2. We examine a hurricane's turbulent eyewall using large‐eddy simulations with Cloud Model 1. Gusts and mean wind speeds near the eyewall of a category 5 hurricane exceed the current Class I turbine design threshold of 50 m s−1 mean wind and 70 m s−1 gusts. Largest gust factors occur at the eye‐eyewall interface. Further, shifts in wind direction suggest that turbines must rotate or yaw faster than current practice. Although current design standards omit mention of wind direction change across the rotor layer, large values (15–50°) suggest that veer should be considered.