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U.S. Department of Energy
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Applicability of digital terrain analyses to wind energy prospecting and siting

Conference ·
OSTI ID:10108443
; ;  [1];  [2]
  1. Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
  2. USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
The recent publication of the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) database by the US Geological Survey (USGS) has provided a unique opportunity for the development of cost-effective wind energy prospecting technology. This database contains terrain elevation values on a Latitude-Longitude grid with a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (about 90 m) for the contiguous United States, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. This database has been coupled with software that will produce shaded-relief maps on a laser printer in a format compatible with the state wind power maps in the US wind energy atlas. By providing a much higher resolution of the terrain features than was possible when the US atlas was prepared, these maps can be useful in general wind prospecting activities. As highly resolved as the 90-m DEM data seem to be when compared to the atlas grid, they still appear to be too coarse to resolve terrain features in the detail required for local wind flow characterization and wind plant layout. Gridded terrain data at about 10-m resolution are available from the USGS for some areas of the United States. In areas where these data are unavailable, they may be generated by digitizing and gridding the contours from a 1:24,000-scale USGS map over the area of interest. Comparisons of terrain profiles from cross sections of the 10-m and 90-m data provide an indication of the effect of resolution on the reliability of terrain feature representation. Oblique views of the terrain in shaded-relief format provide a dramatic enhancement of the shape and relative position of features of interest.
Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
AC06-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
10108443
Report Number(s):
PNL-SA--22117; CONF-930726--6; ON: DE94004363
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English