Geostrophic wind shear from CFSR v2 data for usage in WAsP

The change of the geostrophic wind speed has an impact on boundary layer mixing that can be important for microscale flow modelling for wind energy purposes. The WAsP software is often used for this purpose. This dataset contains the climatological geostrophic wind shear and direction over the whole global on a 0.5 degree grid that has been used in WAsP 12. It was obtained from the 6-hourly CFSR v2 reanalysis for the period 2011 to 2017 (see https://doi.org/10.5065/D61C1TXF). The omni-directional geostrophic wind shear vector denotes how much the geostrophic wind speed is changing over a certain vertical distance. Because we are interested in geostrophic wind shear changes that contribute to turbulent mixing in the atmospheric boundary layer, it was estimated by using the data on pressure levels from the pressure level closest to the surface up to 500 hPa above that heights.

More details about the implementation of the model in the WAsP software and a validation can be found in the corresponding technical report:

Floors, R. R., Troen, I., & Kelly, M. C. (2018). Implementation of large-scale average geostrophic wind shear in WAsP12.1. DTU Wind Energy. DTU Wind Energy E No. 0169