Past and future wind climates over the contiguous USA based on the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program model suite

Pryor, Sara C.; Barthelmie, R.J.; Schoof, J. T.

doi:10.1029/2012jd017449

Cited by 48 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Then, using typical hub heights and a common turbine power curve, they found that the power produced in the summer could decrease by about 40%; although it should be noted that this is a worst case value, estimated under the GCM projection uncertainties discussed previously. Pryor et al [21] used a suite of thirteen simulations from a combination of four Regional Climate Models (RCMs) nested in reanalysis data and four global climate models. These simulations were compared to independent observations and the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) over the contiguous United States.…”

Section: Previous Attempts To Characterize the Future Wind And Solar mentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of climate change on wind and solar resources in southern Africa

2016

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h i g h l i g h t sWe develop a risk-based assessment of climate change impacts on wind and solar resources. We compare results of two GHG mitigation policies in southern Africa. We find a low probability of significant changes for both wind and solar. The effects of mitigation are also mild, although they vary regionally. a b s t r a c tThe mitigation of potential climate change while sustaining energy resources requires global attention and cooperation. Among the numerous strategies to reduce Green House Gas (GHG) emissions is to decommission carbon intensive electricity production while increase the deployment of renewable energy technologies -such as wind and solar power generation. Yet the generation capacity, availability, and intermittency of these renewable energy sources are strongly climate dependent -and may also shift due to unavoidable human-induced change. In this study, we present a method, based on previous studies, that estimates the risk of climate-change on wind and solar resource potential. The assessment combines the risk-based climate projections from the Integrated Global Systems Model (IGSM), which considers emissions and global climate sensitivity uncertainty, with more regionally detailed climate information from 8 GCMs available from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP-3). Southern Africa, specifically those in the Southern African Development Countries (SADC), is used as a case study. We find a median change close to zero by 2050 in the long-term mean of both wind speed and Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI), both used as indicators of changes in electricity production potential. Although the extreme possibilities range from about À15% to +15% change, these are associated with low probability. The most prominent effect of a modest climate mitigation policy is seen in the doubled likelihood of the mode of the distribution of wind power change. This increased likelihood is made at the expense of decreased likelihood in the large changes of the distribution, but these trade-offs with the more extreme likelihoods are not symmetric with respect to the modal change.

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Section: Previous Attempts To Characterize the Future Wind And Solar mentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of climate change on wind and solar resources in southern Africa

2016

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“…The occurrence of intense and extreme wind speeds (defined here as wind speeds in excess of 10 m s 21 at 10 m AGL and above the 95th percentile, respectively) is associated with a range of ecological impacts [e.g., seed dispersal (Bullock et al 2012), forest health (Blennow et al 2010;Gardiner et al 2000;Peltola et al 2010), and crop damage (Moore and Osgood 1985)] and with impacts on major energy, transportation, and built-environment infrastructure (Della-Marta et al 2010;Pryor and Barthelmie 2013a,b;Zhou et al 2002). A further motivation for this analysis derives from evidence of divergent trends in the central tendency and upper tail of the wind speed distribution as observed in historical data (Cusack 2013;Pryor et al 2009). Thus, improved understanding of the magnitude and spatial coherence of extreme and intense wind events is essential for diagnosing the causes of damaging winds and for projecting their impacts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, improved understanding of the magnitude and spatial coherence of extreme and intense wind events is essential for diagnosing the causes of damaging winds and for projecting their impacts. Therefore, improved understanding of the causes of damaging winds is key to assessing how such events may alter under climate nonstationarity (Cheng et al 2014;Pryor and Barthelmie 2014;Pryor et al 2012). Decreases in mean wind speeds have been observed in some regions to be linked to increases in local/regional roughness and/or changes in cyclone storm tracks (Vautard et al 2010), and they have, in some instances, been associated with increases in extreme and intense wind speeds that result from intensification of the hydrological cycle (Huntington 2006) and increased latent heat release in clouds associated with frontal systems such as those studied herein.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intense and Extreme Wind Speeds Observed by Anemometer and Seismic Networks: An Eastern U.S. Case Study

Pryor

Conrick

Miller

et al. 2014

Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology

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The scale and intensity of extreme wind events have tremendous relevance to determining the impact on infrastructure and natural and managed ecosystems. Analyses presented herein show the following. 1) Wind speeds in excess of the station-specific 95th percentile are coherent over distances of up to 1000 km over the eastern United States, which implies that the drivers of high wind speeds are manifest at the synoptic scale. 2) Although cold fronts associated with extratropical cyclones are a major cause of high-wind speed events, maximum sustained and gust wind speeds are only weakly dependent on the near-surface horizontal temperature gradient across the front. 3) Gust factors (GF) over the eastern United States have a mean value of 1.57 and conform to a lognormal probability distribution, and the relationship between maximum observed GF and sustained wind speed conforms to a power law with coefficients of 5.91 and 20.499. Even though there is coherence in the occurrence of intense wind speeds at the synoptic scale, the intensity and spatial extent of extreme wind events are not fully characterized even by the dense meteorological networks deployed by the National Weather Service. Seismic data from the USArray, a program within the Earthscope initiative, may be suitable for use in mapping high-wind and gust events, however. It is shown that the seismic channels exhibit well-defined spectral signatures under conditions of high wind, with a variance peak at frequencies of ;0.04 s 21 and an amplitude that appears to scale with the magnitude of observed wind gusts.

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“…However, analyses of wind speeds from the NARCCAP suite provide clear indication of added value in applying RCMs relative to the driving AOGCM (Pryor et al 2012a) and there is some indication that adopting a non-hydrostatic formulation even at these spatial scales does 'improve' model simulations of extreme wind speeds (Pryor et al 2012b).…”

Section: Added Valuementioning

confidence: 97%

Downscaling of Climate Information

Mearns¹,

Bukovsky²,

Pryor³

et al. 2014

Regional Climate Studies

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The previous chapter summarized the application of global models to simulate climate. The horizontal resolution of these models-generally 1-3 degrees-while adequate for resolving sub-continental North American climate features, is insufficient for simulating the more detailed properties of regional climate. To achieve higher resolution, a variety of so-called downscaling methods have been developed. This chapter reviews these methods and the results of applying them to the regional climate change problem. BackgroundAwareness of the potential inadequacy of the spatial scale of coupled atmosphereocean general circulation models (AOGCMs), for a variety of purposes, has been with us for a long time. When model projections were first used to determine the impacts of future climate on important resources such as crop yields and water resources (e.g., Liverman et al. 1986;Rosenzweig 1985;White 1985) the so-called mismatch of scale issue gained prominence.'Most GCMs neither incorporate nor provide information on scales smaller than a few 100 km. The effective size or scale of the ecosystem on which climatic impacts actually occur is usually much smaller than this. We are therefore faced

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Past and future wind climates over the contiguous USA based on the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program model suite

Cited by 48 publications

References 71 publications

The impact of climate change on wind and solar resources in southern Africa

The impact of climate change on wind and solar resources in southern Africa

Intense and Extreme Wind Speeds Observed by Anemometer and Seismic Networks: An Eastern U.S. Case Study

Downscaling of Climate Information

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