How to prepare, manage and produce a New European mesoscale Wind Atlas

Within the framework of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) project, a consortium of several partners from 7 research institutions is currently preparing a mesoscale wind atlas for Europe. The atlas covers all EU countries including Norway, Switzerland, the Balkans and Turkey as well as the entire North and Baltic Seas and other offshore areas up to 100 km from the coast. For this purpose, the mesoscale model WRF was used and numerous setups where tested over a period of about two years to find an optimal set of model configuration in terms of wind resources. For the final calculation of the wind atlas, the simulated area was split into ten smaller domains to facilitate the handling of the computations. These were made possible by a PRACE tier-0 allocation at the MareNostrum high-performance computer in Barcelona, Spain. The simulation for the final wind atlas product took about six months, where the tasks were distributed among a team of 13 members from the project consortium that was responsible for submitting, surveying, processing and transferring hundreds of individual runs 24/7. To avoid human errors, the setup of the individual jobs was automatized as much as possible. The about 6000 Terabytes of raw mesoscale model data where on the fly post-processed and interpolated to the final grid, leading to a much smaller but still impressive amount of 200 Terabytes of raw data that build the final wind atlas. This mesoscale data was then used for downscaling the winds to 50 m resolution using the WaSP approach. The final product will be available to the public by late June 2019. Besides some first results from the atlas, the presentation will focus on how the setup for the production runs for the wind atlas was selected, how the simulations were coordinated and what computational and organizational effort was made to produce the atlas product.