Assessing the Global Wind Atlas and local measurements for bias correction of wind power generation simulated from MERRA-2 in Brazil

NASA's MERRA-2 reanalysis is a widely used dataset in renewable energy resource modelling. The Global Wind Atlas (GWA) has been used to bias-correct MERRA-2 data before. There is, however, a lack of an analysis of the performance of MERRA-2 with bias correction from GWA on different spatial levels – and for regions outside of Europe, China or the United States. This study therefore evaluates different methods for wind power simulation on four spatial resolution levels from wind park to national level in Brazil. In particular, spatial interpolation methods and spatial as well as spatiotemporal wind speed bias correction using local wind speed measurements and mean wind speeds from the GWA are assessed. By validating the resulting timeseries against observed generation it is assessed at which spatial levels the different methods improve results – and whether global information derived from the GWA can compete with locally measured wind speed data as a source of bias correction. Results show that (i) bias correction with the GWA improves results on state, sub-system, and national-level, but not on wind park level, that (ii) the GWA improves results comparably to local measurements, and that (iii) complex spatial interpolation methods do not contribute in improving quality of the simulation. •Nearest Neighbour method performs well compared to simple interpolation methods.•Global Wind Atlas competes with local measurement data for bias correction.•Bias correction of MERRA-2 with measurements and Global Wind Atlas improves results.•Only for particular wind parks simulation and bias correction methods performed worse.