Contents

Approach

Approach

Objectives

The objectives of this work are:

  1. Investigate use of open data to increase wind measurement coverage of the Irish Continental Shelf (ICS) region, for renewable energy assessment of offshore Areas Of Interest (AOIs).

  2. Scalable data processing for offshore wind analysis, for example wind speed extrapolation and power density estimation.

  3. Prototype wind atlas service, demonstrating interactive offshore AOI wind and power density maps.

Project Activities

The following activities were undertaken:

  1. EOOffshore data catalog: wind products were retrieved from multiple data providers, preprocessed, and persisted to chunked, compressed Zarr stores, which provide a cloud-optimised format suitable for multi-dimensional arrays. All EOOffshore data sets are accessible using the EOOffshore Intake catalog. Each catalog entry provides a description and metadata associated with the corresponding data set, defined in a YAML configuration file. The EOOffshore catalog configuration was originally influenced by the Pangeo Cloud Data Store atmosphere.yaml catalog configuration. Catalog details, including Jupyter notebooks describing data set creation, are provided here.

  2. Scalable catalog processing: Zarr data sets in the EOOffshore catalog are loaded and processed using xarray, a library for processing N-D labeled arrays and datasets. As xarray labels take the form of dimensions, coordinates and attributes on top of NumPy-like arrays, it is particularly suited to the catalog data sets whose variables feature latitude/longitude grid coordinates. To enable support for potentially large data sets, processing of the underlying variable arrays involves Dask, a parallel, out-of-core computing library. Zarr data set variables are loaded into Dask arrays, which are processed in parallel as chunks during subsequent computation. This approach results in a scalable solution that can be applied to data sets of arbitrary sizes (related to heterogeneous spatial and temporal resolutions). Further details may be found in the Offshore Wind in Irish Areas Of Interest and Comparison of Offshore Wind Speed Extrapolation and Power Density Estimation notebooks. All notebooks were executed using the base Docker image for Pangeo JupyterHubs and BinderHubs.

  3. Interactive wind atlas prototype: a prototype wind atlas has been developed, using an interactive dashboard. This features a power density map highlighting AOIs, and plots and tables similar to those provided in the Offshore Wind in Irish Areas Of Interest and Comparison of Offshore Wind Speed Extrapolation and Power Density Estimation notebooks. It operates on the EOOffshore catalog, and is implemented using Bokeh and HoloViz libraries, including HoloViews, GeoViews, hvPlot, Panel and Datashader. The current prototype is described in the MÉRA-based Wind Atlas for Irish Continental Shelf region notebook.

This approach has been inspired by:

  1. Pangeo Gallery, for example, the NASA CCMP Winds Gallery

  2. Pangeo Showcase Webinar Series, for example:

  3. Discussion in Pangeo Discourse and Pangeo GitHub issues.

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Acknowledgements