Basic meteorological stations as wind data source: A mesoscalar test

Wind data represent a critical element in different processes associated to wind energy production, as wind resource assessment, wind forecasting, or wind farm control. A large amount of available information is often excluded from the analysis because it is acquired at stations that do not respect completely the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standards, so that their corresponding collected data could be unreliable for wind energy purposes. However, even if they are distorted by surrounding elements, these abundant data processed as a whole could be an important source of wind measurements. The present work tests the usefulness of the information provided by a group of basic meteorological stations focused on agricultural monitoring. This is done using a simple linear model which extracts a regional wind description from the real measurements. The validation is performed by contrasting with two advanced numerical estimations of the wind climate in the area. The visual and numerical comparison among the estimations shows that basic stations could be considered an interesting source of information, able to help in many wind areas, but also able to supply models specifically designed to work with this kind of data. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.