Development of a numerical wind atlas for South Africa

Two verified wind atlases have been developed for South Africa. The first adopted a statistical-dynamical approach and the second a novel, fully dynamical approach. We verify the atlases against an observational wind atlas generated from three years of data from 10 measurement masts. The statistical-dynamical method underestimates the generalized mean wind speeds at the observation sites whereas the fully dynamical method has lower biases and slightly overestimates the generalized mean wind speeds.

The dynamical method captures thermally forced dynamical processes and also resolves topographically enhanced flows the statistical-dynamical method cannot.