MEAM Seminar: “Atmospheric Boundary Layer Simulations for Wind Energy”
April 29 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
The growth in wind energy is driving a need to understand how wind turbines perform under a range of atmospheric conditions. Under stably stratified conditions, for example, wind turbine wakes can persist for long distances and impact the performance of downwind turbines. Additionally, variations in surface topography, from shallow depressions to steep mountains, can deflect wind turbine wakes upward or downward. These and other factors must be captured accurately by atmospheric models that provide predictions for wind turbine micro-siting and operational wind power forecasting over complex terrain. Here we present examples of mesoscale to microscale simulations at real wind farms with complex terrain, including implementation of detailed models for turbine wake effects. The focus is on understanding how simulation of wind turbine wakes is influenced not only by topography and thermal stratification, but by numerical techniques such as turbulence closure models and grid nesting strategies. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used here in grid nested configurations starting from the mesoscale (~10 km resolution) and ending with fine scale resolutions (~10 m) suitable for large-eddy simulation (LES). Wind turbine wake behavior is examined under stably stratified and convective conditions over complex terrain with comparison to field campaign data.
Fotini "Tina" Katopodes Chow
Fred and Claire Sauer Chancellor's Chair Professor in Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Tina is the Fred and Claire Sauer Chancellor’s Chair Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Tina completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where she received a B.S. in Engineering Sciences in 1998. She then received M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She spent one year in the Atmospheric Sciences Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a post-doctoral researcher before joining UC Berkeley as a professor in 2005. Tina received an NSF CAREER award in 2007, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2011, and the Houghton Award from the American Meteorological Society in 2016. Her current research interests are in improving the numerical models used for weather prediction and air quality forecasts. She and her students have worked on predicting how wind turbines respond in turbulent flow, how wildfire smoke spreads, where pollution is distributed in an urban environment, and how winds are affected by complex mountainous terrain, among other applications. She teaches courses in fluid mechanics, numerical modeling, and community-engaged design.