Prediction of hourly wind speed time series at unsampled locations using machine learning

Various models for wind speed mapping have been developed, with increasing attention on models focusing on mapping wind speed distribution. This study extends these models to predict hourly wind speed time series at unsampled locations. A model based on the quantile mapping (QM) procedure was compared to a traditional and machine-learning model to interpolate wind speed spatially. These proposed models were also used with inputs from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, enabling them to consider local variation in orography and large-scale wind fields. A widely used procedure for mean bias correction of reanalysis based on the Global Wind Atlas (GWA) was implemented and compared to the proposed models. It was found that the QM and machine learning model, both using input from ERA5, significantly outperformed GWA bias correction in terms of time series correlation and probability distribution. Despite being more computationally intensive than GWA bias correction, both models are recommended due to their significantly (in a statistical sense) superior performance.