US-based scientists develop global extreme wind speed atlas to help wind energy sector

Scientists at Cornell University’s Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability, in Ithaca in New York state in the US, have developed a new, digital, global wind atlas. Entitled “A Global Assessment of Extreme Wind Speeds for Wind Energy Applications”, it was unveiled in a paper published in the journal Nature Energy on January 25. It is the first geospatially explicit (that is, its datasets are connected with locations), uniform and publicly available source of information on extreme wind speeds. “Cost-efficient expansion of the wind-energy industry is enabled by access to this newly released digital atlas of the extreme wind conditions under which wind turbines will operate at locations around the world,” pointed out Cornell Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Sara Pryor. “This kind of information will ensure the correct selection of wind turbines for specific deployment and help ensure cost-efficient and dependable electricity generation from those turbines.”