EOOffshore: ERA5 Wind Data for the Irish Continental Shelf Region

EOOffshore is a Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) funded project, which commenced in June 2020 in the School of Physics in University College Dublin (UCD). It presents a case study that demonstrates the utility of the Pangeo software ecosystem in the development of offshore wind speed and power density estimates, increasing wind measurement coverage of offshore renewable energy assessment areas in the Irish Continental Shelf (ICS) region. It has involved the creation of a new wind data catalog for this region, consisting of a collection of analysis-ready, cloud-optimized (ARCO) datasets featuring up to 21 years of available in situ, reanalysis, and satellite observation wind data products.

ERA5 is the fifth generation global reanalysis data set produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It is a component of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), where data products are publicly available in the C3S Climate Data Store. This particular catalog data set (eooffshore_ics_era5_single_level_hourly_wind.zarr.tar.gz) contains 2001-2021 products for the ICS region from the ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1979 to present data set, which provides hourly data from 1979 to the present day, at single levels (atmospheric, ocean-wave and land surface quantities). Wind speed and direction have been calculated from the uX and vX variables, where X = 10 m and 100 m above sea level. This ERA5 data set was used in the EOOffshore project outputs presented (Scalable Offshore Wind Analysis With Pangeo) at the Meeting Exascale Computing Challenges with Compression and Pangeo 2022 EGU General Assembly session.

Description and example usage of the ERA5 data set in EOOffshore:

• ERA5 Wind Data for Irish Continental Shelf region
• Offshore Wind in Irish Areas Of Interest
• Comparison of Offshore Wind Speed Extrapolation and Power Density Estimation

As requested by the ECMWF - Licence to Use Copernicus Products, this Zarr store was:

• Generated using Copernicus Climate Change Service information [2001 - 2021]