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Time series for NASA MERRA wind speed and direction are now available!

29 October 2014 // by admin // News // Comments (0)

climate_wikience_merra_wind_speed_eastward_u10m_1august2010

The 3D view of eastward wind speed (u10m) for the 1st of August, 2010

The wind speed and direction dataset

The new dataset can be found in Climate Wikience at path MERRA.Wind.* within Layers/Temporal tab.

climate_wikience_merra_wind_path_in_tree

The new dataset consists of 4 variables:

MERRA.Wind.Eastward (u).10 m – Eastward wind speed at 10 meters above displacement height
MERRA.Wind.Eastward (u).50 m – Eastward wind speed at 50 meters above surface
MERRA.Wind.Northward (v).10 m – Eastward wind speed at 50 meters above displacement height
MERRA.Wind.Northward (v).50 m – Northward wind speed at 50 meters above surface

Time series for each 4 variables are available since 1 January 1979 up to 31 July 2014 (35.5 years). MERRA wind speed and direction dataset has 1 hour time step. Thus, the data are available daily for each hour:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 GMT +00:00.

Currently time series for wind speed and direction are available for the region covering Australia (shown in transparent blue color):

latitudes 51.5 … -0.5 and
longitudes 101 … -177

The region consists of 12566 points (103 latitude x 122 longitude points). The time series are available for each point.

Limitations

Since there are thousands of points for which time series can be obtained, there is a limitation on the size of geographical region for which time series could be asked in single request. You can ask time series for any geographical region not larger than 0.5° latitude by 1° longitudes in size

The region of size 0.5°x1° covers at maximum 2 points of the wind speed grid.

There is also limitation on the time period that could be requested at one go. Currently the period is limited to 10 years. For example, if you need time series for a region for full available time period, you should perform several requests each not exceeding 10 years. You will be notified on the time series dialog window if the region or time period limitation are violated. Climate Wikience will automatically reduce the selected region and time interval to comply with the limitation.

Both limitations are introduced to keep reasonable the data volumes that could be delivered to your PC over the Internet for your single wind speed query.

Data Table

Time series can be easily retrieved with Climate Wikience. The Data Table can display dates and values for each point of time series for the requested region and time period. Data Table is also able to export the data to Excel or CSV format.