Développement des techniques spatiales de cartographie du potentiel éolien offshore et côtier par imagerie radarsat : cas du golfe du St-Laurent

Abstract

This paper document the usefulness of offshore and coastal wind maps from satellite techniques. As a step before metering programs, remote sensing approaches are gaining much interest, especially for offshore analysis. As an intermediate approach, it gives first estimates of the best wind sites. In the complex coastal area of St-Lawrence gulf, strong effects of local topography characterize wind fields and the wind resource assessment is challenging. Wind fields are extracted from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) scenes provided by the RADARSAT-1 satellite and from QuickSCAT scatterometer collocated wind direction. The spatial resolution of such a technique is around 400 m covering wide region until 300 by 300 km. Among interesting findings, it appears that a relative small sample of scenes can already indicates the best spots to investigate for further analysis. Accuracy of the method is evaluated at 1.5 m/s offshore and around 2 m/s close to the shore.

Keywords

• wind resource
• remote sensing
• RADARSAT-1
• spatial wind variability
• offshore
• coastal