3TIER provides assessment and forecasting services across the weather-driven renewables, including wind, solar and hydro. The company, which has recently opened an office in Hobart, Tasmania, provides services throughout the entire life cycle of a renewable project, from broad-scale prospecting through highly detailed assessments to operational forecasting.

Wind prediction

In providing these services, the company relies heavily on NWP modelling to provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of the weather for a given location. These models require extensive computation resources to process enormous quantities of data.

However, in return for this infrastructure requirement, NWP models can model the entire atmosphere in a physically consistent manner. Instead of using simple correlations between observations or simplified models that use few inputs, such as terrain-based wind speed modelling, the NWP model integrates information about the drivers of the weather. This is achieved by using inputs from a coarse resolution global weather data set and down-scaling them to finer, more useful, resolutions through the use of conservation equations for mass, energy and momentum.

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This process enables the complex interaction between the various parts of the atmosphere to be modelled in their entirety, capturing the interrelationships and their effects on the weather.

For example, wind is not driven by terrain alone, but is affected by pressure and temperature (among other variables), which in turn are affected by others parts of the atmosphere, e.g. solar irradiation.

Global access

A free, online prospecting tool, FirstLook® (http://firstlook.3tier.com), is also provided by the company. The tool is a map-based viewer that generates mean wind speed ranges for any location globally, as well as mean solar irradiance values for anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. It enables users to prospect for suitable renewable energy generation locations, and then access products that can provide a more in-depth assessment of the potential of those locations.

These datasets are also available as geographical information systems (GIS) data layers, permitting more sophisticated spatial analysis. Once a location is selected, FirstLook Reports provide data on the temporal variability of the renewable resource. As interest in a specific location grows, the FullView® products provide a more customised analysis, as well as model correction based on individual measurement data. For example, if there is only one year of measurement data available, the FullView CVA (Climate Variability Analysis) can use that to generate a 40-year perspective, projecting what the energy output from that location would have been over the previous 40 years.

Finally, the Powersight® line of products can provide hour, day, and week-ahead energy production forecasting for almost 10,000 megawatt of installed wind capacity though its.