Robert M. Banta authored and/or contributed to the following articles/publications.
A strong requirement exists from the renewable energy (RE) industry for improved guidance for both wind and solar power generation potential. NOAA has some modest efforts in several key areas that will expand greatly in the next few years to meet this requirement, including more accurate boundary-layer modeling, especially under stable condition...
The wind-energy (WE) industry relies on numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecast models as foundational or base models for many purposes, including wind-resource assessment and wind-power forecasting. During the Second Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2) in the Columbia River Basin of Oregon and Washington, a significant effort was made...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Ground-based Doppler-lidar instrumentation provides atmospheric wind data at dramatically improved accuracies and spatial/temporal resolutions. These capabilities have provided new insights into atmospheric flow phenomena, but they also should have a strong role in NWP model improvement. Insight into the nature of model errors can be gained by s...
Institution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
To advance the understanding of meteorological processes in offshore coastal regions, the spatial variability of wind profiles must be characterized and uncertainties (errors) in NWP model wind forecasts quantified. These gaps are especially critical for the new offshore wind energy industry, where wind profile measurements in the marine atmosph...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Complex-terrain locations often have repeatable near-surface wind patterns, such as synoptic gap flows and local thermally forced flows. An example is the Columbia River Valley in east-central Oregon-Washington, a significant wind-energy-generation region and the site of the Second Wind-Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2). Data from three Doppl...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Model Evaluation by Measurements from Collocated Remote Sensors in Complex Terrain
Model improvement efforts involve an evaluation of changes in model skill in response to changes in model physics and parameterization. When using wind measurements from various remote sensors to determine model forecast accuracy, it is important to understand the effects of measurement-uncertainty differences among the sensors resulting from di...
Institutions Earth System Research Laboratory - ESRL National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Low-level jets (LLJs) are an important nocturnal source of wind energy in the U.S. Great Plains. An August 2017 lidar-based field-measurement campaign [the Land–Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE)] studied LLJs over the central SGP site in Oklahoma and found nearly equal occurrences of the usual southerly jets and postfrontal northeasterly jet...
Institution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA
Doppler-lidar wind-profile measurements at three sites were used to evaluate NWP model errors from two versions of NOAA’s 3-km-grid HRRR model, to see whether updates in the latest version 4 reduced errors when compared against the original version 1. Nested (750-m grid) versions of each were also tested to see how grid spacing affected forecast...
Institution National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA