Global Wind Atlas v3 (orography and bathymetry)

North of 60°N the Viewfinder Panoramas DEM was used, allowing us to include model results for large parts of Scandinavia, Russia, and Canada. For these areas, the main sources to the Viewfinder Panoramas DEM are height contours from Russian military maps and Canadian Digital Elevation Data. The Viewfinder Panoramas DEM had several void regions which were filled using a cubic interpolation in the y-dimension of the raster. This was chosen after investigating many of the void regions and finding that they tended to run east-west.

Both DEM datasets were provided as 1° by 1° tiles in the WGS 1984 coordinate system (EPSG: 4326). To support the UTM projection used in the modeling, the data was re-projected to a 150m grid spacing using cubic interpolation. The interpolation was done using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) tool gdalwarp. The 150m resolution was selected as it corresponds to the effective resolution of the SRTM data.

Negative elevation data for seabed bathymetry was obtained from GEBCO’s gridded bathymetric data set, the GEBCO_2020 grid, which is a global terrain model for ocean and land at 15 arc-second intervals. The GEBCO_2020 grid was prepared for use in the GWA by the World Bank Group.

Data set attribution: GEBCO Compilation Group (2020) GEBCO 2020 Grid (doi:10.5285/a29c5465-b138-234d-e053-6c86abc040b9).

Data combination

The datasets were combined by first masking each using the fine resolution of the GSHHG coastline dataset, to ensure that all land values were positive and all water values were negative, with no data have a value of 0.