Global Wind Atlas v3: Generalized Wind Climates

The generalized wind climate (GWC) file, contains the sector-wise frequency of occurrence of the wind (the wind rose) as well as the wind speed frequency distributions in the same sectors (as Weibull A- and k-parameters), for a fictional environment. This environment is defined with no elevation changes and with a constant roughness length. The GWC files contain five different reference roughnesses (roughness classes) and five different heights above ground level. The GWC file must be downscaled to a given location using a microscale modelling software such as WAsP. It does not provide the actual wind climate at a given location.

For the GWA v3, the GWC data is derived from regional atmospheric model simulations at mesoscale resolution, 3-km grid spacing. The data is generalized for each mesoscale grid cell, and represents the wind climate at the center of the grid cell. The exact coordinates of each cells center is found in the variables this position can be found inside the GWC file, via the south_north and west_east variables. Please note the GWC varies from one mesoscale grid cell to the next, so for large selected areas there can be a significant variation of the GWC.

The data hosted here are stored in a zip file, that unzips to a .zarr file. The .zarr file contains the GWC data for the entire globe. The windkit software can be used to extract the data from the .zarr file to a .lib format for use in WAsP or can be used to read in parts of the data for use directly in PyWAsP. If you only need a few points, we recommend using the Global Wind Atlas website directly to get .lib files.