What is a good database containing wind speed and direction?

Question

I am pursuing a science project involving wind power, and am looking for some data on wind speeds, directions, and ideally turbulence and shear.

Do you know where I could find this? I would need to be able to download a file of this data that can be used in the programming language MATLAB.

So far I have found these two sources:

Do you think these would suit my purpose? I am trying to predict wind turbine energy output based on speed, direction, and/or turbulence and shear.

I know from experience doing similar work for solar potential that NREL has a tremendous amount of data, which can be hard to find and sort out. I would recommend contacting the folks there to see if they can point you to the type of data you're seeking. — LShaver, Nov 20 '16 at 20:51
Duplicate of What are some good databases of wind speed and direction to use as training data for machine learning?. — daniel.heydebreck, Dec 02 '16 at 11:55

410 gone · Answer 1 · 2016-11-21T14:49:26.793

There are lots of possible data sources. It will depend on the years you want, the geographic area you want, and the spatial and temporal resolution you want.

This is quite a large, well-established field. The best thing to do will be to read the existing literature, work out what's already been done, see what datasets your peers are using, and build on it.

Here's a long list of climate data (4 pages worth), I'll note that MERRA is pretty popular for this purpose at the moment, and here are some recent relevant papers:

Using reanalysis data to quantify extreme wind power generation statistics: A 33 year case study in Great Britain, Cannon, Brayshaw, Methven, Coker, Lenaghan 2015
Evaluating the accuracy of CFSR reanalysis hourly wind speed forecasts for the UK , using in situ measurements and geographical information, Sharp, Dodds, Barrett, Spataru 2015.
Using bias-corrected reanalysis to simulate current and future wind power output, Staffell, Pfenninger 2016
Demonstrating the effect of vertical and directional shear for resource mapping of wind power, Clack, Alexander, Choukulkar, Macdonald 2015

And do check out other relevant papers by those authors - Brayshaw, Cannon, Clack, Coker, Sharp, Staffell in particular - and the papers they cite.

What is a good database containing wind speed and direction?

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