• New & Renewable Energy
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.5-11
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• 2010

This paper reviews three commercial softwares for wind climate data analysis in wind resource assessment; WAsP/Observed Wind Climate, WindRose and Windographer. Windographer is evaluated as the best software because of its variety of input data format, analysis functions, easiness of user interface, etc. For a quantitative understanding of uncertainty depending on software selection, a benchmark is carried out with the met-mast observation dataset at the Gimnyeong Wind Turbine Performance Test Site. It is found that Weibull parameter calculation and air density correction have a dependency on the software so that such uncertainty should be considered when an analysis software is selected. It is confirmed that annual energy production calculated by WAsP using a statistical table of frequency of occurrence may have some error compared to a time-series calculation method used by the other softwares.