The latest version 10 of Risoe's wind-analysis software WAsP has been released for a few months now, and after working with it for a while I thought I'd post a few thoughts and comments on how it's working.

WAsP is a micro-scale wind modeling software package used to estimate wind speeds over a region based on measured wind speeds at discrete points (typically met masts). WAsP also forms the backbone for other wind packages such as Windfarmer and Windpro. The orographic-flow model used by WAsP is the 'BZ-model' of Troen (1990), which in simple terms places a high-resolution 2D

polar grid over the measured wind source to estimate the flow perturbations over the region - so this isn't a CFD package. Importantly, the resolution and accuracy of the grid reduces the farther away from the initiation point. The flow model used to estimate the perturbation also assumes that there is no flow separation, and therefore the validity breaks down with more complex terrain.

One of the biggest changes in this release in my opinion is the new Google Earth integration, and it works very well (in the northern hemisphere at least - see below). In a few simple...(Read whole article)