Model intercomparison of the ABL, turbines, and wakes within the AWAKEN wind farms under neutral stability conditions

In previous work, comparisons were made between large-scale simulations of the American Wake ExperimeNt (AWAKEN) wind farms conducted using the large-eddy simulation (LES) codes Nalu-Wind and Adaptive Mesh Refinement-Wind, the engineering wind farm model FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS), and the multi-scale Weather Research and Forecasting model. Significant discrepancies were observed in the modeled wake deficits, and the present paper investigates the sources of this model variability using new simulations with single turbines and smaller domains. From an experimental data set taken from AWAKEN, an idealized neutral stability condition was defined and single-turbine cases using actuator disk were conducted with the different simulation codes allowing for a comprehensive investigation into the similarities and differences between the atmospheric inflow, turbines, and wakes of the simulations. Improvements to the simulation setups in the present study resulted in significantly higher agreement between the modeled results from the three LES models and FLORIS.