Mesoschaal klimaatmodelleren van de energieproductie van toekomstige windmolenparken in de Noordzee

The FREEWIND project aims at developing a planning and forecasting platform for energy production from wind, with the central case study of the Belgian offshore wind zones. The platform plans to incorporate the feedback between wind farms with meso-scale weather systems, such as wind-farm induced gravity waves, which can impact the energy production. Furthermore, also the impact of climatic variations at the timescale of years and decades on the energy production will be considered, in relation to the wind turbine choice, to improve the estimates of wind farm yield. Climate models, and more specifically the Climate Limited-area Modelling Community (CCLM) model, will be used to account for these effects in the predictions of wind farm production. Several PhD students will work in this project, but this specific position will focus more on improving the predictions on the long-term, decadal timescale (2020 - 2050). To this end, output from global circulation models will be dynamically downscaled to the regional scale and the aforementioned feedbacks between wind farms and the atmosphere will be incorporated. The ultimate goal is to provide an ensemble of 30-year predictions of the wind farm yield for the North-Sea region.