Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

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Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments

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Original article

A multi-scale model for day-ahead wind speed forecasting: A case study of

the Houhoku wind farm, Japan
Yuzhang Che a, b, Andrés A. Salazar b, Siyue Peng a, Jiafeng Zheng a, Yangruixue Chen a,
Liang Yuan c, *
a
College of Atmospheric Science, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610225, China
b
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan
c
Chengdu Plain Urban Meteorology and Environment Observation and Research Station of Sichuan Province, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu
610225, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Accurate day-ahead wind prediction from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models is crucial for integrating
Multi-scale wind power into existing grids and wind farm arrangements. Most wind farms in Japan are scattered in
WRF mountainous areas susceptible to strong winds and wind patterns that are highly fluctuating and cannot be
Computational Fluid Dynamics
captured well with mesoscale NWP models. Aiming to provide reliable day-ahead forecasts in rugged zones with
Wind prediction
Coupling
complex topography, we introduce a multi-scale model based on coupling the Weather Research Forecasting
(WRF) model and the Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) Computational Fluid Dy­
namics model. The WRF’s predictions are used as initial/boundary conditions for a microscale simulation using
OpenFOAM. This coupled model can overcome the shortcomings when employing each component indepen­
dently. Numerical simulations and validations are carried out at a wind farm in Houhoku, Japan, during summer
and winter. The multi-scale model results show a considerable reduction in the bias, mean absolute error, and
root mean square error compared to the WRF-alone forecasts. It also has a superior skill against most post-
processing algorithms or artificial intelligence techniques to reduce random forecasting errors. In addition,
analysis of computational cost demonstrates the promising capability of this multi-scale model being a routine
tool.

Introduction such as Netherlands. The difficulty of simulating and predicting low-

Wind energy has the tremendous potential to be the solution to the
shortage of fuel and greenhouse-gas-induced climate change because of
its clean, renewable, and sustainable characteristics. Driven by decades
of scientific exploration and technology development, it has already
played a crucial role as a mainstream energy resource nowadays. Its
global cumulative installed capacity is increasing rapidly in recent years
with 651 GW installed as of 2019. It is expected that over 355 GW of new
capacity will be added between 2020–2024 [1]. However, the utilization
efficiencies of wind remain low, and the abandoned wind rate is rela­
tively high. Also, the integration of wind energy into the existing grids is
still a big challenge due to the substantial variability of wind, especially
over complex terrain regions.
Most wind farms in Japan are scattered in mountainous areas where
wind conditions are more complicated than those in other countries,
level wind might be one of the factors that limit the share of wind en­
ergy to total power generation in Japan, which as of 2019 is only 0.76%.
On the other hand, fossil fuels, including coal, LNG, and oil have a 75%
[2] share. Although this metric has decreased from 78% the previous
year, it is still worryingly high. Concerning the world’s environmental
situation and the reduction of nuclear power supply, the need for
carbon-free and pollution-free wind energy is more urgent than ever
before. Wind power generation is, however, different from other tradi­
tional sources in that its availability depends on the atmospheric con­
ditions. Knowledge of day-ahead hub-height wind is necessary to
develop wind farms, operational control, and grid scheduling.
Many prior studies have treated the estimation of wind using sta­
tistical methods. For example, autoregressive, moving average, and
autoregressive integrated moving average models [3] are primarily
employed. These methods extract information from available

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: yuanliang@cuit.edu.cn (L. Yuan).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seta.2022.101995
Received 12 June 2021; Received in revised form 8 December 2021; Accepted 7 January 2022
Available online 19 January 2022
2213-1388/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Y. Che et al.
observations, and thus the forecasting skill maintains a high accuracy
only a few steps forward [4].
Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have become of particular in­
terest during the last decade, specially those based on data-driven
methods and universal approximators such as artificial neural net­
works (ANN). These methods have the remarkable ability to extract
patterns and detect trends from complicated or imprecise data. [5] and
[6] have employed techniques based on ANNs for wind speed predic­
tion, while [7] included satellite-derived information in an ANN model
to forecast atmospheric variables. Fuzzy logic models [8–10] and the
Jaya algorithm-based support vector machine model [11]have also been
implemented.
These data-driven methods are often used in a hybrid fashion with
different techniques in order to improve their performance. [12] intro­
duced a forecasting model named ANN–MC involving ANN and Markov
chain (MC) for the sake of obtaining accurate wind prediction in a few
seconds in the future. Mode decomposition techniques are also often
coupled with Long-Short term memory (LSTM) networks, which are a
type of ANN specially designed for time-series. [13] performed VMD-
SSA decomposition on demodulated wind speed time series and used
LSTM networks to predict every component, while [14] used a similar
approach but with complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition
(CEEMD) as the decomposition step. In addition, CEEMD have also been
coupled with stacking-ensemble learning approach and machine
learning models to develop a hybrid decomposition-ensemble learning
model [15] for multi-step ahead wind energy forecasting.
It should be stressed that most of these approaches usually consider
only historical wind speed series in one or several observation sensors,
and therefore the atmospheric dynamics have not been taken into ac­
count, which is critical to the day-ahead prediction.
Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models (e.g., Weather
Research and Forecasting (WRF)), which are built based on physical
principles, are usually the optimal option for short-term wind prediction
[16,17]. However, the accuracy of near-surface wind forecasts derived
from NWP models remains relatively low due to the uncertainties and
numerical errors, especially over complex terrain. This kind of situation
has led to the combination of NWP models and statistical approaches
such as theKalman filter algorithm [18], and statistical approaches that
act as a post-processing step [17,19–22]. Most of these studies employed
a low resolution NWP model (3∼ km), and the wind observations used to
calibrate the NWP forecasts were taken from only one or two meteoro­
logical towers. However, employing the similar methods to a wind farm
located over complex terrain areas is hard to obtain accurate forecast for
each individual turbine.
(a)
Fig. 1. (a) Map showing the parent and two nested domains for the WRF model. The triangle stands for the wind farm of interest in Houhoku, Japan. (b) Elevation
(m) map of Houhoku wind farm showing the location of the 12 turbines.
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Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995
As the objective of this study, a multi-scale model is built by coupling
a mesoscale NWP model and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
model to obtain hub-height wind forecasts for each turbine in the wind
farm of interest, considering effects of local terrain and surface rough­
ness. The motivation of this coupling procedure is that implementing
either model (NWP or CFD) independently over complex terrain shows
significant deficiencies. On one hand, the mesoscale model is not able to
adequately represent local terrain with significant variance, a feature
that is vital to simulating wind flow close to the surface. On the other
hand, although CFD models can capture the local effects caused by
complex terrains, the lack of actual initial/boundary conditions makes
their application to real prediction ofwind impossible.
There already exists a few studies [23–27] dealing with combination
of NWP and CFD models, however, most of which are based on idealized
and controlled boundary conditions or low-resolution NWP output,
which cannot provide the turbine-specific day-ahead forecast, especially
where the weather condition varies significantly. Being a continuation
of our existing work [28] to establish a coupled prediction system of
surface wind for wind farms in Japan, we have improved the coupling
procedure with more variables and comprehensively evaluated the
proposed multi-scale model for twelve turbines at a new wind farm
(shown in Fig. 1) in Houhoku, Japan, during both summer and winter.
As a result, turbine-specific forecasts can be derived. Validation results
show that this coupled model aids to facilitate the day-ahead hub-height
wind forecast in Japan, a country with mostly rugged and mountainous
terrain out of which approximately 66% is covered by forest.
We consider the following points to be the main contributions of the
paper:
• A multi-scale model is developed to predict day-ahead wind speed
under complex terrain conditions. A very high resolution (i.e., 500
m) NWP model and a microscale CFD model are coupled to solve
highly fluctuated wind flows.
• This work is the first effort to combine models with different scales
for the purpose of operational use for a wind farm located over
complex terrains in Japan, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. We
sample two months of hourly forecasts from the proposed model to
show its superior performance when compared with an NWP model.
Also, the reduced computational cost make this multi-scale model a
promising routine tool for providing day-ahead predictions.
• A comparison with statistical methods indicates that this coupling
procedure has a superior ability against most post-processing algo­
rithms or AI techniques to reduce random uncertainties.
(b)
Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Next, in Section 2, the details of the dataset, the physical models, and study we employ RANS since the microscale air motion in the atmo­
the coupling procedure are described. Section 3 analyzes the perfor­ spheric boundary layer (ABL) is considered incompressible turbulent
mance of the proposed multi-scale model and a brief discussion is given. flow. The steady and incompressible RANS equations are,
The paper ends with concluding remarks in Section 4.
∂ui
= 0, (1)
∂xi
Model, Methodology and Data
[ ( )]
∂ui ∂p ∂ ∂ui ∂uj ∂ ′ ′
This section describes the mesoscale NWP model and microscale CFD ρuj = − + μ + − ρu u , (2)
∂xj ∂xi ∂xj ∂xj ∂xi ∂xj i j
model used to obtain the forecasts for the region of interest. Throughout
this paper, we refer to the direct output from the NWP model as either where u is the velocity, i and j indicate different directions, ρ is the air
WRF-alone or WRF500 forecast. This section also introduces the Global density, μ is the dynamic viscosity, p is the pressure, and (− ) denotes the
Forecasting System (GFS) data, and the observed data at hub height used Reynolds-averaged quantity. The last term in (2) represents the effect of
to build and validate the performance of the proposed model. sub-grid turbulent eddies, which can be calculated with the standard
k − ∊ turbulence model described in [39]. The turbulent viscosity is μt =
WRF model configuration 2
Cμ k∊ , where Cμ = 0.09, k is the turbulent kinetic energy, and ∊ denotes
the dispassion rate. In this study, all of these equations are solved
As a component of the multi-scale model, the meso-scale WRF model
numerically using the Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation
with Advanced Research WRF (ARW) version 4.0.1 is chosen in this
model (OpenFOAM, ver.7), which is one of the components of the pro­
study; a high-resolution regional model based on a fully compressible
posed multi-scale model. The second order upwind schemes for velocity,
and non–hydrostatic dynamic core. Using the outputs from global-scale
turbulence kinetic energy (TKE), and turbulence dissipation are chosen.
models (e.g., GFS and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather
More detailed information of OpenFOAM can be found in [40].
Forecasts Integrated Forecasting System) as initial/boundary condi­
tions, it can generate high-resolution forecasts in both spatial and tem­
poral spaces.
We set the forecasting domain following the recommendations in
[29,30]. As shown in Fig. 1a, one parent and two nested domains (d02
and d03) with a horizontal resolution of 6.0 km, 1.5 km, and 0.5 km,
respectively, are chosen in this paper; meanwhile, 35 stretched eta levels
in vertical for all domains are adopted. The location of the wind farm of
interest is marked with a red triangle in Fig. 1a, and the surrounding
topography is illustrated in Fig. 1b.
The main physical WRF options used in this work are summarized in
Table 1. These are the Asymmetric Convective Model version 2 (ACM2)
planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme [31], the Noah land surface
model [32], the Eta similarity surface layer scheme [33], Dudhia
shortwave radiation [34], Rapid Radiative Transfer Model (RRTM)
longwave radiation [35], the new Kain–Fritsch convective parameteri­
zation [36], and WRF Single-Moment 6-class (WSM6) microphysics
parameterization scheme [37].
The WRF model needs to be re-initialized each day to output the day-
ahead forecasts. In this study, we run the WRF model on “cold-start”
mode at 18:00 UTC each day, and each run lasts thirty hours. The first
six hours are regarded as the spin-up period [38].Model output has a
constant interval of one hour.

Microscale model

Approaches such as direct numerical simulation (DNS), large eddy

simulation (LES), and Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) are
usually used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. DNS and LES require
solving the extensive range of temporal and spatial scales of a turbulent
flow; thus, a significant amount of computational resources are needed,
making them virtually impossible for practical applications. As a result,
more computationally affordable RANS modeling is the most common
and widespread approach in engineering applications. Therefore, in this

Table 1
Physics options used in WRF predictions for all three domains.
Physical schemes Option

PBL scheme ACM2

Land surface model Unified Noah Land Surface Model
Surface Layer Eta similarity
Shortwave Radiation Dudhia
Longwave Radiation RRTM
Cumulus convection Kain-Fritsch
Fig. 2. A schematic diagram of the multi-scale model for day-ahead wind
Microphysics WSM6
speed prediction..

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Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Table 2
Description of models adopted in this work.
Models Description
WRF500 WRF raw forecasts with a high-resolution of 500 m.
WRF_OF100 Coupled model of which the horizontal resolution of OpenFOAM is
100 m.
WRF_OF050 Coupled model of which the horizontal resolution of OpenFOAM is
50 m.
Multi-scale model: coupling WRF and OpenFOAM
As mentioned earlier, the complex terrain effect plays a critical role
in modifying wind speed and direction in a wind farm site. Under­
standing the wind profile and turbulence is much more complicated than
in a flat area. Although NWP models can predict wind regimes at an
extensive range of scales from several kilometers to hundreds of meters,
they cannot cope with the high spatial resolutions (e.g., < 500 m)
necessary to resolve small, yet often crucial, flow details occurring at a
wind farm over the complex terrain. CFD models have proven successful
in resolving wind flow features at a smaller scale. Nevertheless, the use
of idealized or synthetic initial/boundary conditions for a CFD model
leads to unrealistic flow, which cannot be used directly for the purpose
of operational prediction. Hence, coupling NWP and CFD models can
result in a better modeling approach to predict day-ahead wind for a
wind farm located in mountainous areas. The basic idea is shown in
Fig. 2.
This study proposes using the mesoscale WRF predictions as the
initial guess and boundary conditions for the OpenFOAM model. As
shown in Table 2, two kinds of resolutions (i.e., 100 and 50 m) for the
micro-component model are chosen. Compared to our previous study
[28] more variables, i.e., horizontal wind speed, direction, vertical
speed, and TKE, have been included. To produce the OpenFOAM
boundary conditions, we extracted information from WRF outputs with
a resolution of 500 m through employing the Cressman interpolation
algorithm, which is a method for progressive revisions to interpolate
discrete points (WRF grids in this study) into the regular grid ones within
small errors. It is generally simple, computationally fast and more ac­
curate than other interpolation methods such as bilinear interpolation.
The types of boundary conditions used in this work are summarized
in Table 3. The simulation reaches to the steady state when the residual
is less than 10− 4 . The choice of inlet and outlet patches depends on the
prevailing wind direction calculated using the output of the mesoscale
component at the height of 500 m. We believe that this coupling pro­
cedure results in more representative boundary conditions of local
complex terrain than ideal wind profiles or information from coarser
mesoscale NWP models.
Fig. 3 displays the 20 km × 20 km domain of WRF_OF100. The
domainoverlaps with a region of 40 × 40 grid points of the WRF model.
This kind of configuration is beneficial to extract sufficient information
from the mesoscale model as initial/boundary conditions to drive the
OpenFOAM model. Vertically, 30 stretched levels with an expansion
ratio of 1.94 are chosen. As a result, the mesh close to the surface is
highly refined (shown in Fig. 4) to accurately capture the local details
caused by topographic features. The total number of grid points is 1.2
and 4.8 million for WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050, respectively.
Data
Three different types of data were used: background data for driving
the WRF model, terrain data to generate the grids for the multi-scale
model, and observed data for verifying the forecasting skills of the
proposed model.
Two months’ (January and July of 2019) National Centres for

Table 3
The boundary condition types used for micro-scale component of the proposed multi-scale model.
Boundary Velocity Pressure TKE Epsilon

inlet_patch fixedValue zeroGradient fixedValue fixedValue

outlet_patch inletOutlet fixedValue zeroGradient zeroGradient
ground_patch fixedValue zeroGradient kqRWallFunction epsilonWallFunction

Fig. 3. Calculation domain of the OpenFOAM model. Turbines 1–7 are located around location A and 8–12 are located at B..

4
Y. Che et al.
Fig. 4. An enlarged part of the OpenFOAM domain showing the horizontal and vertical mesh structures..
Environmental Prediction GFS forecasting data are used. The time in­
terval of this dataset is three hours, and the horizontal resolution is
0.25 × 0.25 degree (approximately 27 km) for all variables.
The WRF model uses Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data
2010 dataset (30-arc-second spatial resolution), which contains eleva­
tion data for the globe collected from various sources. Besides, the
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data set, which has a reso­
lution of 3-arc-second, is chosen to generate the structured mesh cells for
both WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050. SRTM data is in the WGS84 datum;
therefore, the coordinates should be transformed from the Cartesian
system to Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM).
To verify the performance of the model predictions we use quality-
controlled nacelle wind observations from twelve turbines of the wind
farm of interest (red triangle in Fig. 1), located in the Houhoku area.
These data sets are available from 2015/01/01 00:00 (JST) to 2019/12/
31 23:50 (JST), with an interval of one hour.
VMD-LSTM
One of the chosen validation methods is a combination of mode
decomposition and neural network-based time series prediction. His­
torical time series of wind speed are decomposed into its corresponding
modes, while the time series prediction method is used on each mode to
forecast its next time step. The final prediction is obtained by recom­
posing all predicted modes. In this paper we employ VMD and LSTM
networks respectively. This combination has been employed in other
studies regarding hybrid methods, both for wind speed [13,41] and
wind power [42,43]. As most machine learning-based models, these
implementations are based solely on historical data and do not comprise
any physical model.
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Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995
VMD was introduced by [44] as a superior alternative to the well-
known Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). In VMD decomposition
all mode waveforms and their corresponding central frequencies are
calculated simultaneously, with each resulting mode having limited
bandwidth and specific sparsity properties. VMD is formulated as a
constrained variational problem. The modes are calculated by using the
Hilbert transform and the width of the sub-modal signal are estimated
from the demodulated signal. Each mode and frequency are obtained
such that they minimize the variational problem.
As for the time series prediction method, LSTM [45] is one type of
recurrent neural network (RNN), targeted at the prediction of time series
and other sequential data. The main difference with a common artificial
neural network is that RNNs are able to share information across
different prediction steps by using feedback connections. In the case of
LSTMs, three gates named “input”, “output” and “forget” control the
information that must be shared with future predictions, as well as the
information that must be forgotten. This makes LSTMs very useful in
keeping track of patterns in the data even if these happen to occur only
sporadically.
Kalman filter algorithm
Kalman filter algorithm is also employed in this study to further
validate the performance of the proposed multi-scale model. It has been
widely used in various fields because it can operate recursively on
available data streams to produce a statistically optimal estimation of
the underlying system state, requiring only a small computational cost.
Similar to ([46,19]), the main mathematical equations which are used to
estimate and remove the errors in the wind speed forecasts, are
described as follows.
Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

( )
x t+δt|t = ̂
̂ x t|t− δt + Gt yt − ̂
x t|t− δt , (3) Effects of complex terrain on hub-height wind forecasts

pt− + σ 2η,t The input of terrestrial data is critical for limited-area mesoscale
(4)
δt
Gt = 2
, models (e.g., WRF) to accurately produce predictions. The wind vector
δt + σ η,t + σ ∊,t
pt− 2
at 00:00 UTC 01 January 2019, and the corresponding terrain conditions
( )( ) for WRF500, WRF_OF100, and WRF_OF050 are plotted in Fig. 6, in order
pt = pt− δt + σ 2η,t 1 − Gt , (5) to illustrate the struggle of the WRF model to detect differences within
the wind farm over complex terrain. Clearly, WRF500 (Fig. 6a) considers
where xt and yt are the forecasting bias (unknown) and forecasting error the region around the wind farm as a much smoother surface compared
(forecast minus observation) at time t, δt is the time lag, Gt and pt denote to the WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 (Figs. 6b and 6c), both which show
the Kalman gain and expected mean square error, and ηt and ∊t are white largely mountainous topography. Correspondingly, the wind vector
noise with variances σ 2η,t and σ2∊,t , respectively. Given a initial guess of p0 among the three models is different.
and G0 , this Kalman filter will quickly converge. The detailed informa­ Another possible explanation for the significant difference in terrain
tion can be found in [46]. between WRF500 and WRF_OF100 or WRF_OF050 is the mismatch of
coordinate systems between the input of terrestrial data for WRF500 and
Results and Discussion the WRF model itself. [48] has pointed out that this distinction is often
neglected during WRF preprocessing (remapping to WRF grids); how­
First, this section introduces the wind conditions in the site of in­ ever, it can cause geolocation shift that can exceed 20 km at mid-
terest. Then we analyze the issues with using only the WRF model to latitudes.
predict wind speed at hub height over complex terrain areas. Next, the To further illustrate the local effects of complex terrain, the wind
output of the multi-scale model is verified during both summer (July) speed among twelve turbine sites for four cases, i.e., 00:00, 06:00, 12:00,
and winter (January). Finally a short discussion is given. 18:00 UTC 01 January 2019, is investigated. Fig. 7 displays the box plots
of wind speed for the three models. It is observed that WRF raw forecasts
(WRF500) largely overestimate the wind speed compared to the corre­
Wind conditions in the site of interest sponding observations for all four cases, whilst the outputs from
WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 are much closer to observations. The big
The Houhoku wind farm is situated in the western part of Japan and interquartile range (IQR) for observed values indicates that the degree of
consists of twelve wind turbines (hub height is 85 m). We have per­ dispersion is apparent, reflecting that the role of local terrain cannot be
formed a statistical analysis based on a full year (2019) of actual data neglected. However, the local effects of complex terrain in WRF500 do
described in Section 2.4. The two-parameter Weibull distribution [47] is not emerge as expected, especially for the case at 06:00 UTC, because
chosen to characterize wind regimes because it has been found to pro­ the IQR is much smaller than that for observed wind. In contrast, the
vide a good fit with measured wind data. The probability density results of WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 are more similar to observations,
function f is given by and the mean wind speed is also close to the observed value. Note that
( ) ( ( ) ) WRF_OF050 outperforms the other two models.
k (w)k− 1 w k
f w = exp − , (6)
c c c
Validation of the multi-scale model
where w, k, and c are the wind speed, Weibull shape factor, and scaling
velocity, respectively. From Fig. 5, we can easily find that the shape Firstly, in Fig. 8 we present four cases of WRF-alone and the multi-
factor is 1.92, which translates into relatively fluctuating winds due to scale model wind speed time series, together with observed values,
complex terrain conditions. Also, the data analysis reveals that the mean during winter. Each case lasts a period of ten days from 00:00 UTC 01 to
wind speed and direction is 5.37 m/s and 235 degrees, respectively, 23:00 UTC 10 January 2019. These cases are selected to highlight the
during the sampled period. The largest mean wind speed (6 m/s) occurs advantages of the multi-scale compared to the WRF-alone forecasts.
from the south-southwest. Although there are occasional significant errors, we find that the

Fig. 5. Weibull distribution of wind speed (left) and wind rose (right) at the wind farm of interest. k, c, SpdAve, and DirAve represent the Weibull shape factor, scale
factor, the mean wind speed, and mean direction, respectively. The bar in the left panel shows the frequency of the observed wind speeds. The value at the end of
each directional line (right panel) is the mean wind speed at that direction.

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Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Fig. 6. Wind vector of WRF500 (a), WRF_OF100 (b), and WRF_OF050 (c) at 00:00 UTC 01 January 2019. Shaded contours indicate the terrain height for different
models. Triangles stand for the wind turbines of Houhoku wind farm.

Fig. 7. Box plots of wind speed for three different models, as well as the corresponding observations, at 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 UTC 01 January 2019. The
purple triangle represents the 12-turbine mean of the observed wind speed.

WRF500 wind speed coincides nicely with the observation through all
four cases in general, indicating that the WRF500 can predict the local
wind speed in the wind farm of interest during winter. Coupling with the
microscale OpenFOAM model leads to the improvement of the fore­
casting skills of WRF500. It can be easily observed that the impact of
WRF_OF100 on the WRF-alone forecasts seems minor at sites No.2
(Fig. 8a) and No.5 (Fig. 8b) while it is significant for sites No.9 (Fig. 8c)
and No.12 (Fig. 8d). Moreover, WRF_OF050 successfully corrects the
overestimation of WRF-alone prediction and can bring the values closer
to the observations for all four cases, surpassing WRF_OF100. It worth
noting that the variation of WRF500 wind forecasts among four turbines
is much smaller than WRF_OF050.
The scenario in summer is depicted in Fig. 9. The ten-day (from 00:00
UTC 01 to 23:00 UTC 10 July 2019) forecasts derived from WRF500,
WRF_OF100, and WRF_OF050 for all twelve turbines are analyzed.
Again, the WRF500 model demonstrates its capabilities for predicting

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Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Fig. 8. Hourly WRF-alone forecasts (black) and corresponding observations (red) of wind speed at hub height of No.2 (a), No.5 (b), No.9 (c), and No.12 (d) turbines
for the 10-day period from 00:00 UTC 01 January to 23:00 UTC 10 January 2019. The blue and green lines present the predictions derived from WRF_OF100 and
WRF_OF050, respectively.

Fig. 9. Hourly WRF-alone forecasts (black) and corresponding observations (red) of wind speed at hub height of twelve turbines for the 10-day period from 00:00
UTC 01 July to 23:00 UTC 10 July 2019. The blue and green lines present the predictions derived from WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050, respectively. (a)-(l) shows the
turbines No.1-No.12.

the local wind speed in summer. Consistent with the situation in winter, models as well as the WRF500, three statistical parameters, i.e., mean
the WRF500 forecast for the twelve turbines has very similar patterns, error (ME), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error
which might suggest that the local terrain effect has been neglected to (RMSE) are employed. These are given by
some extent due to the coarse resolution. When comparing with the
∑
Nt
results of the two multi-scale models, we see the remarkable advantage ME =
(
pt − at
)/
Nt , (7)
of coupling mesoscale model with microscale model in reducing the t=1
forecasting errors, especially the systematical error. ⃒ ⃒
Overall, WRF_OF050 shows the best performance, both in winter and ∑Nt ⃒
⃒
⃒/
⃒
summer. On the other hand, WRF_OF100 offers moderate improvement MAE = ⃒pt − at ⃒ Nt , (8)
t=1
⃒ ⃒
and sits mostly between WRF500 and WRF_OF050; although in the
summer case, it can get closer to the observations during days 4–5. All (
∑
Nt
)
/
these results show the proposed multi-scale model outperforming the RMSE = sqrt (pt − at )2 Nt , (9)
WRF-alone model, and it can be seen that the higher resolution of the t=1

microscale component we adopt, the larger improvement can be

obtained. where t is the time point and Nt is the total number of time points during
Next, to quantitatively assess the performance of the multi-scale the verifying periods. p and a represent the prediction and actual value,

8
Y. Che et al.
respectively. For both summer and winter cases, a one-month length of
data is used to compute those statistical parameters. The results are
summarized in Figs. 10 and 11, and Tables 4 and 5.
Fig. 10 shows the diurnal cycle of 12-turbine averaged wind speed
and MAE values for WRF500, WRF_OF100, and WRF_OF050. It is
observed that the diurnal cycle of the observed wind is not evident for
both winter (Fig. 10 and summer (Fig. 10c) cases, where the wind at
local night-time (09:00–21:00 UTC) is slightly larger than that at day-
time in winter, while the phenomenon in summer is opposite. Again,
the overestimation of WRF500 can be observed during both winter and
summer, and the multi-scale models can primarily reduce it, in partic­
ular, WRF_OF050. The multi-scale model (i.e., WRF_OF050) forecasts’
variability in space is supported by the behaviour of box plots in
Figs. 10a and 10c, and it is more significant in winter than the case in
summer. It also should be mentioned that the forecasting skills of the
three models do not degrade too much with the increase of forecasting
lead time, indicating the advantage of physical-based models against the
pure statistical models for day-ahead wind prediction.
The MAE is exhibited in Figs. 10b and 10d for winter and summer,
respectively, to show the quality of the forecasts. Again, the WRF-alone
model shows the largest values of MAE, while WRF_OF050 shows the
smallest, at all times. There is a clear trend that the WRF500 MAE values
at local night-time are larger than local day-time. The increase of MAE
starts around 18:00 JST (09:00 UTC), which might reveal that the WRF
model’s weakness of precisely capture the physical processes during the
evening transition [49] over complex terrain region. However, the
multi-scale models also cannot effectively improve such a situation.
More adaptive local parameterization schemes may be needed.
We show the performance of WRF500, WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050
at each turbine site in Fig. 11. Also, to quantitatively prove the advan­
tages of the multi-scale models, we have compiled in Table 4 and Table 5
the summarized results for the cases of winter and summer, respectively.
Fig. 10. (a) and (c) show the diurnal cycle of 12-turbine averaged wind speed of WRF500, WRF_OF100, WRF_OF050 and the corresponding actual values during
winter and summer, respectively; box plots signify the variation of WRF_OF050 wind speed between twelve turbines. (b) and (d) are the the diurnal cycle of wind
speed MAE for different models in winter and summer, respectively.
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Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995
For the winter scenario, it can be seen that the ME of WRF-alone pre­
diction varies between the 12 turbines (Fig. 11a), from 1.87 m/s to 3.43
m/s. Both WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 can reduce the overestimation
of WRF-alone for all turbines, suggesting that the multi-scale models
have a solid ability to alleviate the systematic error of the WRF model.
The largest reduction can be found at turbine No.8 with 99.98%, given
by the WRF_OF050 model. The12-turbine mean is 93.08%. Consistent
with ME, results for MAE and RMSE (displayed in Figs. 11b and 11c)
further demonstrate that multi-scale models are superior to WRF500 for
day-ahead hub height wind prediction. Note that WRF_OF050 out­
performs WRF_OF100 for all turbines.
Similarly, in summer, the systematic error of WRF500 has been
reduced by WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 as well (Fig. 11d), with the 12-
turbine-mean of relative improvements being 47.39% and 83.44%,
respectively, although such improvement is slightly smaller compared to
those in winter. The MAE and RMSE displayed in Figs. 11e and 11f also
demonstrate that coupling a mesoscale NWP model with a microscale
CFD model has the capability of making up for the drawbacks of
employing the mesoscale model solely over the complex terrain area.
Clearly, WRF_OF050 is superior to WRF_OF050 in regard to the reduc­
tion of both systematic errors and random uncertainties.
From the above discussions, we may conclude that employing the
multi-scale models proposed in this study can substantially improve the
accuracy of the WRF-alone model in forecasting the hub-height wind
field in the target wind farm site of interest, where the terrain condition
is complex. The more satisfactory resolution of the micro-scale compo­
nent we have, the better improvement against the WRF-alone model can
be obtained.
Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Fig. 11. A comparison of the ME, MAE, and RMSE for wind speed at hub-height of the WRF_OF100 (solid light blue bar) and WRF_OF050 (solid green bar) pre­
dictions with respect to the raw WRF-alone prediction (solid white bar) for the twelve turbines of the Houhoku wind farm, during winter (left panels) and summer
(right panels). The averaged results of three statistical parameters are also shown.

Table 4
Improvement of ME, MAE, and RMSE (m/s) for twelve turbine sites at the Houhoku wind farm on January 2019.
ME MAE RMSE

Site WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050 WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050 WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050
Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%)

No.1 2.30 28.08 89.16 2.65 5.35 27.69 3.26 3.11 25.22
No.2 2.34 15.95 96.50 2.69 -2.16 34.40 3.25 -3.93 30.94
No.3 2.08 3.02 90.83 2.51 -6.69 30.01 3.06 -8.52 26.32
No.4 1.90 2.87 85.02 2.30 -7.56 23.48 2.81 -10.15 19.11
No.5 2.48 26.59 99.72 2.82 9.92 41.35 3.38 7.75 36.87
No.6 2.87 29.48 94.41 3.05 20.00 42.80 3.59 15.18 37.71
No.7 3.02 30.04 90.06 3.25 15.29 46.55 3.92 12.80 42.85
No.8 2.85 47.02 99.98 3.02 28.06 48.99 3.53 24.35 44.43
No.9 3.23 50.89 94.88 3.36 36.25 57.26 3.89 31.84 52.82
No.10 2.38 40.33 91.70 2.68 19.06 43.27 3.16 15.72 37.78
No.11 2.19 28.60 96.10 2.53 10.21 38.43 3.04 6.56 33.52
No.12 3.11 39.10 88.63 3.25 25.88 53.38 3.80 21.95 49.63
Mean 2.56 28.50 93.08 2.84 12.80 40.64 3.39 9.72 36.43

Comparison with statistical methods
VMD-LSTM
This subsection will briefly describe the implementation details of
the VMD-LSTM validation method. In order to obtain a target 24-h
forecast, the wind data of the 5 previous days (120 values) was taken
as the main feature for training. Feature and target vectors are decom­
posed using the VMD algorithm and a k = 5 number of modes is
obtained.k +1 LSTM networks are trained independently to learn to
predict each mode, plus the residue. All networks have the same ar­
chitecture: one input layer of size 120, two hidden LSTM layers with 64
and 128 nodes respectively, and one output layer of size 1. The networks
are train to predict only one time step in the future. The 24-h forecast is
obtained in a recursive manner that used in [13]; after each prediction
the first entry in the input vector is discarded, the predicted value is
appended and the resulting input vector is fed to the LSTM to obtain the
next prediction. After all LSTMs have produced the 24-h prediction for
their corresponding components, the results are combined and a
reconstructed wind speed forecast is obtained. g Out of five years of
observed wind speed data, four were used for training and one for

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Y. Che et al. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995

Table 5
Improvement of ME, MAE, and RMSE (m/s) for twelve turbine sites at the Houhoku wind farm on July 2019.
ME MAE RMSE

Site WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050 WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050 WRF500 WRF_OF100 WRF_OF050
Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%) Improv. (%)

No.1 1.96 61.00 74.78 2.38 19.51 32.07 2.89 16.46 19.16
No.2 1.84 58.32 76.83 2.28 14.96 26.62 2.74 11.13 12.01
No.3 1.50 37.13 70.61 2.16 10.24 16.32 2.72 8.21 5.63
No.4 1.60 28.73 76.33 2.45 6.63 28.73 3.03 5.10 17.69
No.5 1.66 53.90 74.91 2.14 8.06 24.15 2.72 7.07 16.14
No.6 1.65 47.81 78.08 2.08 7.54 27.05 2.65 7.67 18.42
No.7 2.11 30.43 95.17 2.36 11.69 36.55 2.99 9.81 29.07
No.8 2.49 50.47 88.52 2.71 18.76 39.15 3.41 13.60 36.54
No.9 2.60 55.46 87.59 2.79 26.93 44.25 3.69 25.00 44.17
No.10 1.98 51.12 99.48 2.28 9.59 28.62 2.96 6.46 25.69
No.11 1.58 46.27 95.54 2.06 10.41 17.55 2.65 4.99 14.29
No.12 2.52 48.00 83.44 2.72 25.91 41.91 3.52 22.27 40.44
Mean 1.96 47.39 83.44 2.37 14.19 30.25 3.00 11.48 23.27

Fig. 12. Profiles of the diurnal cycle of 12-turbine mean ME (a) and RMSE (b). Dotted lines stand for results of VMD-LSTM during winter (blue) and summer (red),
while solid lines represent results of WRF_OF050.

validation. The networks were trained using MSE as a loss function and
the Adapted Momentum Estimation method as an optimizer [50]. Each
component was normalized independently before training.
Fig. 12 shows the comparison of diurnal cycle of 12-turbine mean of
ME and RMSE between VMD-LSTM and WRF_OF050, during both winter
and summer. It is observed that both methods have much smaller sys­
tematic errors (Fig. 12a) compared to the WRF-alone forecasts (shown in
Figs. 10a and 10c). For the winter scenario, 24-h averaged MEs are
0.004 m/s and 0.092 m/s for WRF_OF050 and VMD-LSTM, respectively,
while they are − 0.120 m/s and 0.036 m/s during summer. These results
indicate that VMD-LSTM shows roughly equivalent skill to WRF_OF050
in terms of the systematical errors. Nevertheless, RMSE values (Fig. 12b)
indicate that physically-based WRF_OF050 shows a better capability
against VMD-LSTM. The forecasting skill of VMD-LSTM decreases fast
with forecasting lead time, especially after 12 h, during both winter and
summer. On the contrary, the RMSE of WRF_OF050 maintains a nearly
consistent level throughout.
Kalman filter
As mentioned earlier, many statistical methods, such as the Model
Output Statistics method and Kalman filter, are usually employed as
post-processing tools to alleviate the forecasting errors of NWP models
in the wind energy field. These methods can combine available historical
observations to bring the predicted values closer to the observations for
each turbine in the wind farm, considering the local effects as we did in
this work. To determine whether the coupling procedure proposed in
this work is necessary, we also adopt the Kalman filter algorithm to post-
process the WRF-alone forecasts.
We implement the Kalman filter to the forecasts of the WRF-alone
model and WRF_OF050 at each wind turbine separately, during both
winter and summer. The first 21 days are chosen as a training period,
and the left ten days for validation. Although the Kalman filter pro­
cedure can be applied independently to every prediction lead time, we
adopt one step (1 h) forward in this study, considering the length of the
data sample. To evaluate the performance of Kalman filtered forecasts
for alleviating random error explicitly, the centred RMSE (CRMSE),
which is the random component of the RMSE [51],
CRMSE2 = RMSE2 − ME2 , (10)
is used. The 12-turbine averaged results are summerized in Fig. 13,
showing the WRF-alone (diamond) and the multi-scale WRF_OF050
forecasts (asterisk), and the post-processing forecasts by combining
Kalman filter, i.e., “WRF500 + KF” and “WRF_OF050 + KF”. The dotted
grey circular line has a radial distance from the origin (0, 0) that equals
the RMSE value. Consistent with the conclusion in Section 3.3, WRF500
shows relatively large RMSEs being 3.29 m/s and 1.72 m/s in winter and
summer respectively, and it can be reduced by employing WRF_OF050.
A closer look at Fig. 13a let us find that the contribution of ME and
CRMSE to RMSE of WRF500 is much the same. Combining WRF and
OpenFOAM leads to a considerable reduction of both systematical error
and random error. Specifically, for total reduction of RMSE by
WRF_OF050, the percentages are 79% for systematical error and 21% for
random error. Implementing Kalman filter to WRF-alone forecast (5-
point star in Fig. 13a) also exhibits the improvement of RMSE; it even

11
Y. Che et al.
Fig. 13. ME as a function of CRMSE for the cases of winter (a) and summer (b), showing the WRF-alone (diamond) and the multi-scale WRF_OF050 forecasts
(asterisk), and post-processing forecasts of Kalman filter.
performs better than WRF_OF050. However, that reduction mainly owes
to the improvement of systematical error, which corresponds to 89% in
the entire reduction of RMSE. That means that the Kalman filter plays a
crucial role in reducing the difference of central location of the forecast
and the observation while minor impact to random uncertainties.
Finally, it should be mentioned that “WRF_OF050 + KF” outperforms
others on reducing both ME and CRMSE, indicating that combining the
multi-scale and Kalman filters has advantages against the direct imple­
mentation of Kalman filter to WRF-alone forecast. Similar results
observed in Fig. 13b further support the above conclusion.
Discussion
The proposed multi-scale models behave better than the mesoscale
WRF model from the validation above. However, on this multi-scale
model, some aspects need further discussion.
• The comparison of WRF_OF100 and WRF_OF050 indicates that a
better resolution of the microscale component for the multi-scale
model generates better forecasts at individual turbines site over a
mountainous region. Following this principle, a higher resolution,
for example, 25 m, may lead to a better forecast compared to
WRF_OF050. However, as mentioned in Introduction section, we
hope this model can be a helpful tool for operational use. Increasing
the resolution makes it difficult to afford the computational burden.
There is a comprise between accuracy and computational cost.
Table 6 shows the wall clock time (hours) needed to finish the day-
Table 6
The wall clock time (hours) needed to finish the day-ahead forecasts. The wall
clock time for the mesoscale WRF model is measured in a server with the 2.00
GHz Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8164 processor, while for micro-scale compo­
nent it is measured in a PC with the 3.00 GHz Intel i9-9980XE processor.
Models No. of cores for No. of cores for Total wall clock
mesoscale component microscale component time (hours)
WRF500 50 — ∼1.3
WRF_OF100 50 12 ∼1.3 + ∼2.4
WRF_OF050 50 12 ∼1.3 + ∼4.8
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Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments 52 (2022) 101995
head WRF500, WRF_OF100, and WRF_OF050 forecasts. A doubling
in calculation time is observed when increasing the microscale
component’s resolution from 100 m to 50 m. Note that increasing the
number of cores used for the microscale model will reduce the total
wall clock time, enabling this multi-scale model (WRF_OF050) to be
a practical tool.
• Most studies on simulating wind flow over complex terrains choose
the steady neutral conditions within the atmospheric boundary layer
(ABL). In this work, non-neutral conditions are adopted because the
boundary conditions come from WRF real-time predictions. How­
ever, it is essential to note that some points in the boundary of the
micro-scale model are out of the WRF lowest level due to the dif­
ference in the terrain conditions. Therefore, there is no enough in­
formation in those points when extracting from the WRF model. We
solve this drawback using the log wind profile under the neutral
condition in this work.
• For operational use, the actual wind direction from the WRF model is
used to determine the patch types (e.g., inlet and outlet) of micro­
scale component of the multi-scale model.
• This multi-scale model can be a promising candidate for imple­
menting statistical post-processing approaches, most of which can
only handle the systematical bias.
Conclusion
The multi-scale model combining the advantages of a mesoscale
NWP model and a microscale CFD model was introduced, to generate
day-ahead forecasts with high resolution over the regions of complex
geographical features where the wind patterns are more fluctuating than
usual.
The proposed model has been validated in winter and summer using
data at a wind farm of interest in Japan, where the terrain condition is
complex. It is observed that the multi-scale models consider the local
features and can substantially improve the accuracy of the WRF-alone
model in forecasting the hub-height wind field in winter and summer.
Specifically, compared to the WRF-alone forecasts, the 12-turbine
averaged improvement of WRF_OF050 in ME, MAE, and RMSE is
93.08%, 40.64% and 36.43%, respectively, in the winter case. Similarly,
in summer, the improvement is 83.44%, 30.25%, and 23.27% in ME,
Y. Che et al.
MAE, and RMSE, respectively.
Also, we find that the higher resolution of the microscale component
leads to a superior improvement against the WRF-alone model, although
there is a comprise between accuracy and computational burden when it
is expected to be a practical tool.
In addition, the results of VMD-LSTM and Kalman filter indicate that
this coupling procedure has a competitive ability for day-ahead wind
forecastingagainst most of AI-based methods or post-processing algo­
rithms to reduce forecasting errors, especially for random uncertainties.
Finally, it is essential to note that across-scale wind forecasting is very
challenging. The coupled model in this work was developed based on
some simplifications, including the absence of Coriolis, buoyancy and
gravity forces, and a precise canopy model. In addition, a turbine model
may be needed to solve wake effects among different turbines.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Yuzhang Che: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation,
Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization.
Andrés A. Salazar: Writing - review & editing, Methodology. Siyue
Peng: Software, Visualization, Data curation. Jiafeng Zheng: Software,
Formal analysis, Data curation. Yangruixue Chen: Writing - review &
editing, Visualization. Liang Yuan: Conceptualization, Methodology,
Formal analysis.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of Clean Energy Factory Co., Ltd.,
Tokyo, Japan, for providing the observation data. This work is sup­
ported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants No.
41905084) and National Undergraduate Training Program for Innova­
tion and Entrepreneurship (grants No. 202010621003).
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