Numerical Weather Forecast Advances for Clean Energy Production

The objective is to create new weather-forecast products to enable BC Hydro meteorologists to better support electric-power generation, power transmission, dispatch of emergency repair crews, anticipation of electric loads, and energy trading. The method is to use powerful computers to solve atmospheric equations for future weather (a method called Numerical Weather Prediction, NWP), and to improve and tailor the output as specified by BC Hydro. Projects include improvements of: extreme-weather “situational awareness”, turbulent boundary-layer effects, hourly precipitation forecasts, “nowcasts” that combine NWP with local observations, forecasts for electrical transmission and distribution, statistical correction of forecast biases, understanding and forecasting of wind and wind ramps at wind turbines, the ability of an ensemble of forecasts to account for chaos in the atmosphere.

Faculty Supervisor:

Roland Stull

Student:

Jesse Mason, Zhiying Li, David Siuta, Banafshah Afshar, Greg West, Rosie Howard

Partner:

BC Hydro

Discipline:

Geography / Geology / Earth science

Sector:

Energy

University:

University of British Columbia