Present and future offshore wind power potential in northern Europe based on downscaled global climate runs with adjusted SST and sea ice cover

Coupled global climate models coarse results have been downscaled to produce future wind power maps for northern Europe. The downscaling method utilizes a global, stretched atmospheric numerical model with sea-surface temperature (SST) as the main forcing. The model has horizontal grid spacing equivalent to about 30 km in the area of interest. As the climate models have often problems with the sea ice cover and storm tracks in vicinity of the sea ice, an alternative SST approach has been used. The SST signal from climate model runs under the A1B scenario has been added to the Era40 reanalysis data set, and used as lower boundary forcing. A 30-year control period (1972–2001) is compared to a future period (2020–2049) of equal length. Four realisations of the future period constitute the ensemble, which the future wind power potential is estimated from.