Wind Atlas for South Africa (WASA). Report on Measurements

The key to any good and accurate wind atlas is good quality data. To this end the 1st Verified Numerical Wind Atlas South Africa, for parts of the Northern and Eastern Capes as well as the Western Cape makes use of meteorological data from ten sites, distributed throughout the modelling domain, to verify the results of the meso-scale modelling.

The Measurements work package (WP2) is one of six work packages that collectively make up the Wind Atlas for South Africa (WASA) project. The measurements also provide observed wind climates at the measurement sites, which can be used by micrositing software, like WAsP, to predict the resource potential, i.e. the expected Wh production from a specified turbine or wind farm in the vicinity of the mast.

The sole objective of WP2 was to provide high quality wind measurements for a period of three years for the purpose of verifying the meso-scale modelling across the modelling domain. Criteria were established and a site selection process was undertaken with the specific aim of fulfilling the verification needs.

The three year measurement campaign only started once the tenth measurement mast had been fully commissioned. The tenth mast to be commissioned was WM06 (Sutherland) and this was completed on 17 September 2010. The outputs of WP2 are: i. Establish 10 high quality wind measurement stations providing three years of measurement data for calibration of the mesoscale modelling. ii.

A database system for wind data collection and on-line Web display. iii. Report on measurements. There are also some outputs not specifically listed in the project outputs. These are: i. Site description report ii. QC data from the ten sites available free of charge for download by the public. This report documents the three year measurement campaign and includes all aspects related to the measurement of wind at the ten measurement masts.

This report also provides details on where the data is located on the web (links).