The Global Wind Atlas is widely used across the world

The Global Wind Atlas 2.0 (GWA 2.0) of DTU Wind Energy was launched six months ago, with support by The World Bank Group.

The GWA 2.0 provides new global data sets of wind resource data, accounting for high-resolution climatology and topography and using a unified and documented methodology. 

A recent update to the GWA 2.0 makes it now possible to download a WAsP wind atlas file for a user specified area. The file contains wind climate data, which can be used, for example, to carry out preliminary design and planning of wind energy projects in WAsP and other microscale modelling software.

Used by more than 30000 users in the first 6 months

Tens of thousands of people have already used the website. From the launch on November 28, 2017 and until May 28, 2018, the numbers show 33,096users from 203 different countries. In the last month 5552 users from 150 countries visited the site.

The next step will be to disseminate the microscale modelling results with a finer 250 m calculation spacing.

“It is being completed at the moment and we plan to incorporate it in the GWA 2.0 in summer 2018” says Jake Badger, Head of Section at DTU Wind Energy.

In 2018, an increased effort in the validation of the GWA and new analysis tools will be added to the website. In 2019, there is the plan to launch a GWA 3.0 including significantly updated modelling outputs and serving some temporal characteristics summaries of wind resources. Importantly, the GWA 3.0 will also serve maps of annual energy production and capacity factor.