Caracterization and Modeling of Wind Pattern over Tropical Atlantic Ocean Basing.
Renewable energy. Wind modeling. RegCM4.
The economic and social structure of a country is linked mainly to the energy sector. This sector is vulnerable to climate change being responsible for most of the emission of greenhouse gases. From this premise, investments are needed in new alternative energy generation, such as wind power generation in offshore regions in view of its great potential for power generation. However, estimating the wind potential of a region, especially offshore, is difficult because of the low availability of observed wind speed data at these sites. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to evaluate the performance of the RegCM4 regional climate model in simulating the annual and seasonal wind speed climatology in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean Basin and to identify the wind potential for energy generation. For this, a simulation comparison of the model with observed data of winds of the product Blended Sea Winds and PIRATA will be carried out, as well as reanalysis products belonging to Era-Interim, using the root mean square error method, identification of BIAS and Pearson correlation. For the identification of the wind potential, the power density formula will be used. Therefore, it is expected to determine the error associated with the RegCM4 model in simulating the observed data, to identify the possible reasons for the model to overestimate or underestimate the observed wind speed data and to identify regions with potential for wind power generation.