Professor Brian Colle at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) is leading a field effort called the IMPOWR (Improving the Mapping and Prediction of Offshore Wind Resources) project, which is improving atmospheric modeling of low-level wind fields using a combination of aircraft and in situ tower observations. The field effort is the part of a three-year project funded ($675,219) by the Department of Energy (DOE) that was awarded to Stony Brook University (Prof. Colle, lead investigator), and it involves Matthew Sienkiewicz (graduate student at SoMAS) and a few scientists and a graduate student at the University of Delaware’s Center for Carbon-free Power Integration. Since there are relatively few weather observations over the coastal Atlantic Ocean, atmospheric models are important to map the offshore wind resources and to forecast the wind power potential from hours to days in advance. However, these models have large windspeed uncertainties over the ocean, especially at wind turbine height at a few hundred feet above the ocean, which leads to large uncertainties to the amount of power available for certain weather patterns. Prof. Colle noted, “There is a large wind resource along the U.S. East coast and that is just starting to be explored. It is important for universities such as Stony Brook and Delaware to help the wind power industry by leading efforts to collect observations and improve the models.”
The IMPOWR field project, which occurs from April thro
ugh early July of 2013 and again in 2014, includes the region surrounding Nantucket Sound, which is the likely location of America’s first offshore wind farm by Cape Wind, Inc.. Cape Wind is a partner in the IMPOWR project and has allowed Stony Brook and Delaware to instrument the platform on their 60-m tower within Nantucket Sound. Other towers with weather instrumentation for this project include the 25-m Air-Sea Interaction Tower (ASIT) located just south of Martha’s Vineyard, owned by the University of Connecticut, and the 25-m Buzzard’s Bay tower operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
An instrumented Long-EZ aircraft, owned and operated by Ultra-Pure, Inc., collects temperature, wind, and humidity data at a frequency of 20 times per second as it profiles the lower atmosphere from about 30 m to 1500 m above the ocean surface. Prof. John Mak at SoMAS is the pilot of the Long-EZ and Matthew Sienkiewicz has flown on a few flights. He commented that “a few low-level flights in a small single-engine aircraft definitely help grow a respect for the turbulent boundary layer,” and he looks forward to analyzing the data for his thesis.
There have been 7 Long-EZ flight days, sampling a wide variety of wind and temperature regimes from cool onshore (easterly) flow regimes to warmer and more turbulent southwesterly cases. Several more flights are planned later in June to help sample the sea breeze and coastally enhanced winds during the summer. Prof. Colle said, “It can be a much different world a few hundred feet above the ocean. For example, during one flight it was 75oF and blowing 30 kts, while it was only 55oF and 10 kts over the relatively cool ocean. These unprecedented observations will help our models better predict these rapid wind variations with height, which ultimately will improve the offshore wind resource assessment and forecasts along the U.S. Northeast coast.”
For more information about the IMPOWR project, please visit http://dendrite.somas.stonybrook.edu/IMPOWR/impowr.html
