Virtual Met Mast
Get high-resolution wind resource data up to 30 years and at any hub-height to prospect sites, calculate yields, and accelerate project planning.
Generate data for shear calculation at heights ranging from 10m to 300m, covering a period of up to 30 years from 1989 to D-90.
Choose from 10 min, 15 min, hourly and daily intervals, with time series produced at a highest spatial resolution of 30m x 30m
Unlock the fastest computation in the world. Your dataset is computed and delivered to you in less than 24 hours.
Built in collaboration with leading partners
The Virtual Met Mast, a groundbreaking achievement from the EU-funded WindSider project, resulted from a dynamic collaboration between Singular Logic, Nazka Mapps, the Technical University of Denmark, and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. By generating high-resolution wind resource data, it provides invaluable insights for strategic planning of financially viable wind farms.
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Related Resources
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Modeling Methodology
Like many wind data services, the basics of 3E’s microscale wind resource model is the well-known WRF model, i.e.
- We generate a mesoscale climatology on a 3x3km grid at hourly resolution by combining our own Weather Research & Forecasting (or WRF) model and deep learning to optimise the computational processes for long periods.
However, to achieve a spatial and temporal resolution that can capture the local effects of topography at a specific location and height, we apply three models to end up with a high-resolution full-scale microscale wind model, i.e.
- We downscale the spatial resolution to a grid of 30x30m by correcting for topographic effects at the local scale based on the wind atlas methodology3. Very high-resolution topographic data (10m for land cover, 30m for elevation) are used in this process to better capture heterogeneity in the surroundings of the target site.
- We correct the spectral domain of the WRF model using the principles of the Spectral Correction Method (or SCM), correcting the dampening effect of WRF’s mesoscale simulations at a 1h-1 resolution.
- We extend the spectral domain of the WRF model by including sub-hourly turbulence effects with a microscale spectral boundary layer model, to achieve a 10min output resolution.
Virtual Met Mast Data Sheet
Validation & Accuracy
Experience the difference of meticulously validated data. Dive into in-depth insights by downloading our whitepapers today.
In 2022, 3E's Virtual Met Mast (VMM) model was introduced, utilizing detailed land cover data and microscale wind models for (sub-)hourly time resolutions. The resulting timeseries is comparable to on-site measurements and outperforms the market reference ERA5. This data has become the new market standard in the wind industry and is applicable for all stages of wind farm development.
3E's VMM achieves a highly accurate forecasting with a global mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 9.5% at hourly resolution over 146 met masts, compared to ERA5's MAPE of 14.5%. For more details on our modelling methodology and accuracy, please refer to the paper.
