How do North American weather regimes drive wind energy at the sub-seasonal to seasonal timescales?

Abstract

There has been an increasing need for forecasting power generation at the subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales to support the operation, management, and planning of the wind-energy system. At the S2S timescales, atmospheric variability is largely related to recurrent and persistent weather patterns, referred to as weather regimes (WRs). In this study, we identify four WRs that influence wind resources over North America using a universal two-stage procedure approach. These WRs are responsible for large-scale wind and power production anomalies over the CONUS at the S2S timescales. The WR-based reconstruction explains up to 40% of the monthly variance of power production over the western United States, and the explanatory power of WRs generally increases with the increase of timescales. The identified relationship between WRs and power production reveals the potential and limitations of the regional WR-based wind resource assessment over different regions of the CONUS across multiple timescales.

Tracking precipitation features and associated large-scale environments over southeastern Texas

“…We consider the periods of March-May (MAM), June-August (JJA), September-November (SON), and December-February (DJF) to construct a training data set for each season. Choosing an appropriate number of SOM nodes to prescribe requires balancing the trade-off between distinctiveness and robustness (Liu et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2022;Huang et al, 2022). Song et al, (2019) found that clustering the convection associated weather patterns over the Great Plains using four nodes resulted in distinct large-scale environments while minimizing redundant nodes.…”