Probabilistic Model for Wind Speed Variability Encountered by a Vessel

Abstract

As a result of social awareness of air emission due to the use of fossil fuels, the utilization of the natural wind power resources becomes an important option to avoid the dependence on fossil resources in industrial activities. For example, the maritime industry, which is responsible for more than 90% of the world trade transport, has already started to look for solutions to use wind power as auxiliary propulsion for ships. The practical installation of the wind facilities often requires large amount of investment, while uncertainties for the corresponding energy gains are large. Therefore a reliable model to describe the variability of wind speeds is needed to estimate the expected available wind power, coefficient of the variation of the power and other statistics of interest, e.g. expected length of the wind conditions favorable for the wind-energy harvesting. In this paper, wind speeds are modeled by means of a spatio-temporal transformed Gaussian field. Its dependence structure is localized by introduction of time and space dependent parameters in the field. The model has the advantage of having a relatively small number of parameters. These parameters have natural physical interpretation and are statistically fitted to represent variability of observed wind speeds in ERA Interim reanalysis data set.