Bias Corrected NOAA HRRR Wind Resource Data for Grid Integration Applications

Description

To address the need for regularly updated wind resource data, NREL has processed the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) outputs for use in grid integration modeling. The HRRR is an hourly-updated operational forecast product produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Dowell et al., 2022). Several barriers have prevented the HRRR's widespread proliferation in the wind energy industry: missing timesteps (prior to 2019), challenging file format for wind energy analysis, limited vertical height resolution, and negative bias versus legacy WIND Toolkit data (2007-2013). NREL has applied re-gridding, interpolation, and bias-correction to the native HRRR data to overcome these limitations. This results in the now-publicly-available bias corrected and interpolated HRRR (BC-HRRR) dataset for weather years 2015 to 2023. Bias correction is necessary for wind resource consistency across weather years to be used simultaneously in planning-focused grid integration studies alongside the original WIND Toolkit data. We show that quantile mapping with the WIND Toolkit as a historical baseline is an effective method for bias correcting the interpolated HRRR data: the BC-HRRR has reduced mean bias versus comparable gridded wind resource datasets (+0.12 m/s versus Vortex) and has very low mean bias versus ground measurement stations (+0.01 m/s) (Buster et al., 2024). BC-HRRR's consistency with the legacy WIND Toolkit allows NREL to extend grid integration analysis to 15+ weather years of wind data with low-overhead extensibility to future years as they are made available by NOAA. As with historical datasets like the WIND Toolkit, BC-HRRR is intended for use in grid integration modeling (e.g., capacity expansion, production cost, and resource adequacy modeling) both independently and alongside the legacy WIND Toolkit.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
21 Documentation page for NREL's renewable energy resource datasets https://nrel.github.io/rex/misc/examples.nrel_data.html
0 Example code usage for a similar dataset which can be applied to the BCHRRR data. https://nrel.github.io/reV/misc/examples.running_with_hsds.html#windpower
21 See for more information on the HRRR model from NOAA. https://rapidrefresh.noaa.gov/hrrr/
33 Presentation associated with this dataset, titled "Bias Correcting NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Wind Resource Data for Grid Integration Applications." https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy25osti/91749.pdf
21 AWS public dataset program registry page for data released under the Wind Toolkit. The registry page contains information about dataset documentation, access, and contact, for each of the Wind Toolkit Data Lake datasets. https://registry.opendata.aws/nrel-pds-wtk/
0 Publication detailing the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) project motivation and system description. Includes a link to the companion article detailing forecast performance. https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-21-0151.1
21 Released to the public as part of the Department of Energy's Open Energy Data Initiative, the Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) is an update and expansion of the Eastern Wind Integration Data Set and Western Wind Integration Data Set. It supports the next generation of wind integration studies. https://data.openei.org/s3_viewer?bucket=nrel-pds-wtk&prefix=bchrrr%2F

Tags

  • data
  • weather
  • wind-resource
  • noaa
  • meteorology
  • operational-forecast
  • wind-power
  • wind
  • weather-years
  • spatiotemporal
  • power
  • hrrr
  • bchrrr
  • wind-toolkit
  • energy

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