A Chilean program explores winds over the Atacama Desert region and is producing a public model and observational database in support of the development of wind energy projects. WIND ENERGY EXPLORATION OVER THE ATACAMA DESERTA Numerical Model-Guided Observational Program ricardo c. Muñoz, Mark J. Falvey, Mario arancibia, valentina i. astudillo, Javier elgueta, Marcelo ibarra, christian santana, and caMila vásquez R enewable energy, especially wind and solar, is an increasingly important field in applied meteorology and climate science. From the initial studies that explore the availability of these energy resources in a given area, to the forecasting models required to optimize the operation of wind or solar power plants, meteorological expertise is needed to design and execute measurement programs, and for the modeling of resource variability. Renewable energy poses special challenges compared to more traditional meteorological applications (Emeis 2013). In the case of wind power, for example, most phenomena of interest occur within the atmospheric boundary layer over horizontal scales ranging from the microscale to the mesoscale. Moreover, the viability of many renewable energy projects depends on the accuracy of the meteorological variables measured and modeled, with even small errors having large financial implications. On the other hand, the emergence of the renewable energy industry has led to a significant increase in the number of measuring sites being deployed worldwide, often in locations previously devoid of meteorological data. The commercial market for meteorological instrumentation has also responded, with the development of sensors tailored to satisfy specific renewable energy requirements. While this enhanced data availability and new instrumentation certainly has great scientific potential, it is true that because of the commercial interests behind most renewable energy projects, the associated meteorological information is usually not fully available to the general scientific 2079OCTOBER 2018 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY |

In 1994, a collaborative programme was set up between the University of Surrey and the Chilean Air Force to design and build a low-cost 50 kg microsatellite with instrumentation capable of monitoring the distribution and concentration of stratospheric ozone, particularly over Chilean territory. This resulted in the joint design and development of the ozone-layer monitoring experiment (OLME), which was flown on board the resultant FASat-Bravo microsatellite, launched in July 1998 into an 820 km altitude Sun-synchronous orbit. The nadir-pointing OLME measures the solar ultraviolet light backscattered from the atmosphere in four spectral bands. From these raw radiometric data, total column ozone concentrations can be deduced. Since the launch, a series of high-spatial-resolution measurements have been made over Chilean scientific stations, while continuous low-spatial-resolution measurements have been used to provide global coverage. To date, the University of Surrey has concentrated on these global measurements, and has used a simplified ozone retrieval algorithm to check the results qualitatively against ozone maps produced by NASA's Earth Probe Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) payload. These initial results look promising, with apparently good correlation between the two datasets. A novel, more-complex retrieval algorithm has been applied to the high-resolution data, and early results have shown agreement with the TOMS.