Wind forecasts at 180 m altitude
Now available in Open-Meteo APIs
Wind forecasts at 180 m above ground are now available in Open-Meteo APIs and can be used free of charge for non-commercial use!
Typically wind speeds at higher altitude tend to be stronger. This can be approximated by the wind profile power law.
Open-Meteo uses weather models which calculate wind speeds at higher altitudes (wind levels 10, 80, 120 and 180 meters above ground) more precisely.
As of today, 180 meter wind forecasts are available!
Below you can see wind speed forecasts for all wind levels. In most occasions, 180 m wind is significantly stronger than lower level, but sometimes the difference is smaller than expected. At calmer winds 80, 120 and 180 m wind are almost the same.
Along with wind speed, wind direction is available as well. All 4 wind levels typically follow the same wind direction, but you can observe that at turning wind directions, one wind level turns sooner than another. The sudden drop from 360° to 0° is normal, because wind direction is expressed as degrees from 0° to 360°.
Important notice for data scientists: if you use wind speed data to forecast wind power generation, please do not rely on absolute wind speed numbers! We recommend to use simple Machine-Learning (ML) algorithms to train forecasts with local measurements. The Random Forest algorithm is a great start!
If you already built some ML application, please feel free to reach out and share your results!