November 20, 2011. San Diego, California.
As part of its ongoing project to provide meteorological support to the 2013 America’s Cup program, a team of WeatherFlow meteorologists were staged in San Diego to support the latest event in the America’s Cup World Series. This series is a set of preparatory races, staged by the America’s Cup race organizers and taking place in locations across the globe, with the initial races taking place in Cascais, Portugal and Plymouth, United Kingdom. After San Diego, the Series will move through a set of venues, including Naples and Venice, Italy, Newport, Rhode Island, and San Francisco itself, culminating in the Louis Vitton Cup and the America’s Cup itself.

For the San Diego series, WeatherFlow’s onscene meteorologists provided up-to-the-minute forecasting support for the race committee and officials, tracking and reporting on a series of storms that passed through the area and impacted the race area. With WeatherFlow help, organizers were able to adjust race times and locations to provide the best racing while maintaining safe conditions for both crews and spectators.

For the duration of the race, WeatherFlow installed an extremely high resolution version of its WRAMS mesoscale model, with a horizontal resolution of 250 meters to allow it to capture the extremely small scale topographic features surrounding the San Diego race course. The event also featured a customized implementation of WeatherFlow’s WindAlert application. Building on WindAlert’s powerful feature set, WeatherFlow programmers were able to provide additional custom functionality for the race, providing a one-stop weather resource for race organizers and teams.

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November 14, 2011. Buxton, North Carolina.
WeatherFlow’s Wind Energy Mesonet (WEM) continues to expand in a steady manner, even as market conditions in the wind energy sector remain unsettled due to uncertainty about federal policy towards wind and other renewable energy sources. Even though the rate of new wind installations has slowed for now, the benefits of a consolidated, single-source network of hub-height observations remain clear.

Recent highlights include the installation of two tall tower-based SCYLLA observing systems in Merkel and Sweetwater Texas, located in the nation’s largest wind production area in West Texas. Data from these two towers is being ingested in to the WeatherFlow databases, where it is being analyzed by WeatherFlow meteorologists and being made available to selected WeatherFlow partners. WeatherFlow’s Triton SODAR remains in operation in Massachusetts, where engineers are working with local authorities to help gauge the wind resource along the Massachusetts coastline.

Further south on the East Coast, WeatherFlow recently was awarded a contract by the University of North Carolina to place SCYLLA instruments on a tall tower in the Outer Banks. Initial planing is focused on a pair of towers in the Buxton area, with an anticipated installation in the first quarter of 2012. This location will provide an unprecedented boundary layer data set for use in evaluating this potentially rich offshore wind zone.

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October 24, 2011. New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
This summer and fall continued a strong performance for WindAlert, WeatherFlow’s latest observation and forecast display application. Initially released in 2009, the web- and mobile-device application has gone through a number of upgrades, adding the capabilities most requested by the product’s users.

One of the most important set of improvements is the ability to display several additional types of data on the display, including:

• – digital nautical charts,
• – sea surface temperatures,
• – weather radar,
• – weather model forecast output maps, and
• – hurricane tracks.

To help demonstrate these and other new functions, new training videos have been posted on the WindAlert web site, allowing users to quickly get up to speed and take advantage of these powerful new features.

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Since its installation, the Caribbean mesonet has been warmly received in the region and has filled significant gaps in available weather observing data. WeatherFlow’s station at *** provides badly needed data for the port of San Juan and for the first time has allowed the local National Weather Service Forecast Office to verify its forecasts for the nearshore waters. The entire network proved its value during the 2011 Hurricane season, when it provided much-needed data during Hurricane Irene, which caused one death and left more than 800,000 without power in Puerto Rico.

The new CARICOOS station is expected to be installed in early 2012 and is expected to be joined by an additional mesonet of four 60 meter meteorological towers and one SODAR to be installed on the islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas. WeatherFlow is in the final planning stages of this project, working with the Virgin Islands Energy Office to install these boundary layer sensors in order to assess the wind energy potential for the region.

With a unique mix of surface-based and boundary layer sensors, this combined observing capability provides a dramatic increase in the quantity, quality, and breadth of weather data available to local citizens, businesses, and government planners. WeatherFlow will be continuing an active outreach program, working with the local cruise ship and tourist industries to refine its products and services for these sectors, increasing safety for both the public and the private sectors.

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August 30, 2011. Poquoson, Virginia.
Meteorologists from WeatherFlow’s Virginia office recently began a pair of intensive studies of the wind conditions found along the North Carolina and Virginia coastlines. Although funded by different sources and sponsors, the projects are employing similar methodologies and are building on the lessons learned provided by each.

For the studies, WeatherFlow meteorologists are applying their unique understanding of small scale coastal wind processes, gained through decades of combined forecasting experience. Because the amount of wind energy generated is extremely sensitive to small changes in wind speed, the small scale wind patterns found in the coastal zone can have an outsized effect on the amount of energy generated at wind farms located on land in the coastal zone and in the offshore waters. At the large scale, the waters of the East Coast are generally agreed to represent a significant wind energy resource, but there has been little formal study of the smaller scale patterns that can dominate right along the coastline, often in spots that are contemplated for wind farms.

Working with the University of North Carolina and James Madison University, the WeatherFlow projects are designed to systematically monitor forecasted and observed conditions along the North Carolina and Virginia coastlines, respectively. The prior experience of WeatherFlow forecasters is being put to use by identifying common (but often unnoticed) small-scale weather patterns and setups, and then using those to investigate the winds at specific coastal locations.

The results of the studies will be used to better understand the dynamics of the wind flows along these coastlines, which will be of tremendous use in future decisions regarding wind farm locations and expected production. The results will also be used to improve weather modeling capabilities and operational forecasting systems for use in planning, installation, and operations of anticipated coastal wind farms.

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