Evaluation of sea surface roughness parameterization in meso-to-micro scale simulation of the offshore wind field

Abstract

Accurate parameterization of the wind-induced effects on the Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer (MABL) is of fundamental importance for many applications including weather forecasting and offshore wind energy. Roughness parameterizations derived from different datasets are widely used but their performance is not sufficiently assessed under realistic marine environmental conditions. To this end, a multi-scale atmosphere–wave coupled model is constructed for the first time and used in the simulation of the MABL flow over the North Sea. Results show that our model is able to capture the large-scale variation of the mean wind meanwhile reproducing the appropriate turbulence energy cascade in the frequency domain. The performance of different roughness parameterizations is evaluated in comparison with the measurement data from the FINO1 platform. The Taylor-Yelland method outperforms the others on statistics of the mean wind while yielding the highest bias of the Turbulence Kinetic Energy (TKE) from the observations. However, we find that the discrepancy between our simulation and observation mainly depends on the meso-scale model. The magnitude of the differences caused by roughness parameterizations is negligible, especially in low wind speed conditions. The micro-scale simulation is demonstrated as not sensible to the roughness input in the considered wind–wave condition.