New climatologies of wind velocity are being developed for Australia based on BARRA, the first high-resolution reanalysis for Australia currently being developed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Reanalysis datasets are valuable because they provide a consistent method of representing the atmosphere over multiple decades, giving greater understanding of the weather over Australia, including during extreme events and in areas where observational data are sparse. BARRA provides hourly gridded data at 12-km resolution for the entire Australian continent and surrounding regions (Jakob et al. 2017) as well as much higher resolution (1.5 km) data over four smaller domains and will ultimately cover the period 1990 to 2017.

Wind climatologies are required by many industries including the energy sector, infrastructure, research and private organisations. Current wind climatologies are based on model data for the period 2004 to 2008 http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climate_averages/wind-velocity/index.jsp. These data are obtained from MESOLAPS (MESOscale Limited Area Prediction System), a model that had been superceded by ACCESS in 2010 (Bureau of Meteorology, 2010). BARRA can now fill the gap by providing more accurate data with high spatial and temporal resolution for Australia for a 28-year period.

This poster describes the methods used to develop the new wind climatologies. Because of the much higher temporal resolution compared to MESOLAPS (hourly rather than four times a day), these climatologies are not limited to average wind velocities but can also explore extreme wind speeds. An assessment of differences between BARRA and station observations will be presented. Visual comparisons between grids of average wind velocities based on MESOLaps and BARRA will be undertaken to provide guidance on how the current and new climatologies differ. These comparisons are expected to highlight the information that BARRA can add because of the increased spatial and temporal resolution.