New version of the Canadian Wind Energy Atlas

October 14, 2008 - An improved version of the Canadian Wind Energy Atlas has been released by Environment Canada, showing seasonal numerical results.

Here is the complete list of new features:

• maps displaying numerical results of mean wind speed and mean wind energy for five different periods: annual, winter (December, January, February), spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), and fall (September, October, November). The Atlas of seasonal data was created using seasonal frequencies of the climate states as weights to the same model outputs used for the annual atlas;
• elimination of discontinuities between some tiles using a method of weighting of the results of each tile;
• display of the values of mean wind speed, mean wind energy, Weibull shape parameter (k) and scale parameter (A) in the popup window of wind data obtained by clicking on a point or entering a latitude/longitude;
• possibility to enter a postal code instead of a latitude/longitude to display such data;
• new calculation of the turbine formula, with a calculation of Weibull shape parameter (k), formerly constant; the turbine formula is displayed for the five abovementioned periods;
• UHR variable available in the MID/MIF and RPN downloadable files;
• improvement of the interface:
  • "Zoom" button to display more quickly a high-resolution image of the current map, now showing the overlap with neighbouring tiles;
  • "Overall map" button to display in a small window the overall map corresponding to the field displayed in the current map, in order to have a comprehensive view of this tile among the others;
  • moving to the corresponding tile when a latitude/longitude or a postal postal is entered to display wind data.

The Canadian Wind Energy Atlas is a contribution from the EOLE Project, a research project hosted by Environment Canada (RPN) and initiated in year 2000. Most of the results are based on WEST (Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit), a system developed for the project.