Predictability of weather and climate

Abstract:

This chapter of the 2020 Report of the FABLE Consortium Pathways to Sustainable Land-Use and Food Systems outlines how sustainable food and land-use systems can contribute to raising climate ambition, aligning climate mitigation and biodiversity protection policies, and achieving other sustainable development priorities in the UK. It presents three pathways for food and land-use systems for the period 2020-2050: Current Trends, Sustainable Medium Ambition, and Sustainable High Ambition (referred to as “Current Trends”, “Sustainable”, and “Sustainable +” in all figures throughout this chapter). These pathways examine the trade-offs between achieving the FABLE Targets under limited land availability and constraints to balance supply and demand at national and global levels. We developed these pathways in consultation with national stakeholders and experts, including from the Department for Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the Department for International Trade (DIT), the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland (DAERA), the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Committee on Climate Change, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and modeled them with the FABLE Calculator (Mosnier, Penescu, Thomson, and Perez-Guzman, 2019). See Annex 1 for more details on the adaptation of the model to the national context.

Abstract:

Electricity generation output forecasts for wind farms across Europe use numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. These forecasts influence decisions in the energy market, some of which help determine daily energy prices or the usage of thermal power generation plants. The predictive skill of power generation forecasts has an impact on the profitability of energy trading strategies and the ability to decrease carbon emissions. Probabilistic ensemble forecasts contain valuable information about the uncertainties in a forecast. The energy market typically takes basic approaches to using ensemble data to obtain more skilful forecasts. There is, however, evidence that more sophisticated approaches could yield significant further improvements in forecast skill and utility.In this letter, the application of ensemble forecasting methods to the aggregated electricity generation output for wind farms across Germany is investigated using historical ensemble forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). Multiple methods for producing a single forecast from the ensemble are tried and tested against traditional deterministic methods. All the methods exhibit positive skill, relative to a climatological forecast, out to a lead time of at least seven days. A wind energy trading strategy involving ensemble data is implemented and produces significantly more profit than trading strategies based on single forecasts. It is thus found that ensemble spread is a good predictor for wind power forecast uncertainty and is extremely valuable at informing wind energy trading strategy.