Abstract
This report provides a time-sensitive update to the 20-year wind resource data set (named “CA20”) produced in 2020 by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the Outer Continental Shelf off the coast of California. The findings in this report represent the best information available as of August 31, 2022. Following the deployment of two floating lidars in the region in late 2020, NREL compared the CA20-modeled wind speeds against the lidar measurements using two different approaches: 1.Comparison of lidar observations against a 1-year extension of the CA20 data set that overlapped with the lidar period of record (October 2020–September 2021). 2.Comparison of the original 20-year CA20 data set against a synthetic, long-term-adjusted lidar data set that matched the CA20 period of record (2000–2019), which was obtained by applying the measure-correlate-predict method to the short-term lidar observations and the ERA-5 reanalysis product.