Canadian Wind Atlas

[CWEA]

The main features are:

• use the global 2.5 deg NCEP 3D climatology/reanalysis;
• downscale this climatology to a mesoscale domain using WEST;
• cover Canada in a mosaic approach;
• using the WEST outputs for each tile of the mosaic, generate a statistical database of WE;
• enable further downscaling for future more local investigations;
• provide input data for microscale models (eg WASP) for further refinment of the Atlas.

The mosaic is based on the primary quadrangles of the National Topographic System (NTS) of Canada. These measure 4 deg of latitude by 8 deg of longitude; this amounts to about 440 km on a conformal Mercator map, see Figure 1; the official NTS quadrangle identification numbers are shown, e.g. 31 for that of Montreal. The mosaic terminates at 64N, thus including southern Yukon.

This defines Level 1 of the CWEA. Each of the tiles is covered by a modelling mesh with a 5-km spacing. The Level 1 Atlas is an active project of Year 2002. Click here for preliminary results.

Level 0 of the CWEA is the non-mosaic national map shown. It corresponds to a seamless modelling calculation based on a 25-km spacing. Click on the map for further details and access to its data.