Wind Energy Potential along the Onshore and Offshore Qatar

Abstract

Wind energy is one among the clean and renewable energy resources. The utilization of nonconventional energies over the conventional sources helps to reduce the carbon emissions significantly. The present study aims at investigating the wind energy potential at select coastal locations of Qatar using ERA5 winds. ERA5 is the updated reanalysis product of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in which the scatterometer and in situ wind data are assimilated to improve the accuracy of predictions, thus the long-term and shortterm variabilities are reasonably well captured. Compared to the earlier studies, in this work, we have assessed the wind power at inland and offshore areas of Qatar, considering 40-year long (1979-2018) time series data with hourly ERA5 winds at 10-m height. The results show that there is no significant increase or decrease of wind power around Qatar in the last 40 years in most of the locations, while there is a slight decreasing trend in the offshore areas of Al Ruwais. This indicates that the average wind power is consistently available throughout the years. The links of climatic indices, especially the ENSO events with the wind climate of Qatar, are clearly evident in the long-term data. As obvious, the offshore regions of Qatar have relatively high wind power compared to the land areas. Among the selected locations, the highest annual mean wind power density is obtained in the offshore Al Ruwais (152 W/m2), followed by offshore Ras Laffan (134 W/m2) and land area of Al Khor (120 W/m2). The maximum wind power density varies between 1830 and 2120 W/m2 in the land areas, while it is between 1850 and 2410 W/m2 in the offshore areas of Qatar. The highest wind power is consistently available during the prevalence of shamal winds in winter (January-March) as well as summer (June).