Effect of climate change on design wind at the Indian offshore locations

The impact of climate change on design wind speeds corresponding to different return periods at two selected offshore locations in India has been assessed. Extreme daily wind speeds corresponding to various return periods were derived based on the observations made by wave rider buoys during the period 1998–2005. Thereafter, the future climate over the next century was simulated at these locations using the input from the climate model: GCM-CGCM3 corresponding to the A2 scenario. The underlying downscaling model was developed with the help of artificial neural networks and using observed wind as output. The local wind speeds corresponding to these projected wind data were generated for the next century and return period wind speeds were extracted by the distribution fitting. Comparison of design wind speeds derived with and without consideration of future climate showed that the magnitude of the long term wind speed would certainly and significantly increases if the effect of global climate change is incorporated in the analysis. For the two locations considered, the increase in the 100-year wind was found to be varying from 44% to 74%.