Event

The Department of Physics hosts the seminar of Ms. Xsitaaz T. Chadee on Thursday 2^nd August, 2012, at 10am, at the Natural Sciences Building, Room 413.

Ms. Chadee will discuss “A General Methodology for Wind Mapping in Data Sparse Tropical Regions and for the assessment of uncertainties from Turbulence Closure Schemes.”  

Abstract:

Wind mapping has traditionally been generated from a large number of point-wise wind tower measurements. While measurements provide the best estimate of the wind resource, they are usually insufficient to estimate wind speeds between widely spread locations. For this reason, numerical wind mapping methods have become more predominant in the past decade for the initial assessment of wind resources, prior to validation with meteorological towers. Numerical mapping methods generally provide an error estimate in the wind resource using fairly large in-situ data sets. However, in tropical regions, where measurements are sparse, this error or uncertainty estimate is usually not available, or may be representative of errors related to one terrain type. In addition, certain aspects of the numerical wind mapping process that are most relevant to small islands is not tailored for wind flow modeling in tropical regions.

This seminar briefly describes the data sources available for wind mapping studies, the main numerical wind mapping model types, the model chosen for this work, the strategies employed to modify the numerical wind mapping process for low latitude tropical regions, and the assessment of numerical wind map uncertainties due to turbulence closure. The methodology discussed here will be applied to the development of a wind map for Trinidad and Tobago. 

This seminar provides a general methodology for tropical regions including the assessment of uncertainties. The details of the method will be presented in two follow-up seminars.