A wind chart to characterize potential offshore wind energy sites

Offshore wind industry needs to improve wind assessment in order to decrease the uncertainty associated to wind resource and its influence on financial requirements. Here, several features related to offshore wind resource assessment are discussed, such as input wind data, estimation of long-term and extreme wind statistics, the wind profile and climate variations.This work proposes an analytical method to characterize wind resource. Final product is a wind chart containing useful wind information that can be applied to any offshore sites. Using long-term time series of meteorological variables (e.g. wind speed and direction at different heights), the methodology is applied to five pilot sites in different countries along European Atlantic corridor and it is used to describe and compare offshore wind behavior.