Abstract
In the context of developing wind energy for the generation of electricity in many countries, proper knowledge and understanding of the availability of wind resources over these countries are of great importance. This paper demonstrates how the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model can be used to simulate the wind flow patterns over a complex terrain such as the island of Mauritius at a horizontal spatial grid resolution of 1 km × 1 km in view of generating reliable wind speed data. The simulation period spans from January 2015 to December 2017. The WRF results are validated against ground truth data for various climatic conditions such as calm days and the occurrences of two extreme events, namely a cyclone and an anticyclone. Statistical metrics such as Bias, RMSE and Pearson correlation are used for comparing both the datasets. Excellent agreement with r-values above 0.6 is obtained for all the cases considered. Finally, high-resolution (1 × 1 km) mean monthly, seasonal, and yearly wind maps are generated for the island of Mauritius.
