A new Wind Atlas to support the expansion of the Italian wind power fleet

As a contribution to national strategic energy planning, recent developments in meteorological modeling and wind generation technologies have improved the representation of the spatio-temporal features of wind. This paper describes an updated Italian Wind Atlas (Atlante EOLico ItaliANo [AEOLIAN]) released in the early 2000s. The objective of AEOLIAN is to guide future wind generation to accord with ambitious European greenhouse gas emission targets set for 2030 and 2050. AEOLIAN is the result of a collaboration effort between Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico (RSE) SpA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which jointly developed a novel approach combining high-resolution numerical weather modeling with the Analog Ensemble (AnEn) statistical technique. This paper uses dynamical model runs with hourly output for 1990–2019 with 4 km horizontal grid spacing. For 2015–2019, an inner grid nest with 1.33 km horizontal grid spacing is used. The AnEn is then employed to temporally extend the 5 years of high-resolution runs back through 1990–2014 to create a 30-year dataset for Italy and surrounding marine areas. A thorough verification is carried out using 104 observational stations homogeneously distributed throughout the territory. Compared with other state-of-the-art products, AEOLIAN provides enhanced accuracy over complex terrain thanks to higher horizontal resolution and the assimilation of observational wind data over the domain, which result in a reduction of model bias on complex terrain and a better reconstruction of the wind distributions. Finally, a new WebGIS interface (https://atlanteeolico.rse-web.it/) to explore AEOLIAN data is described.