North American Regional Reanalysis

The foundation of our WindCheck process is one of the most sophisticated historical weather data sets available today - the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR).  A cooperative project between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the NARR merges 31 years (1979-2009) worth of observed wind speeds with the output from  an extended and customized run of NCEP's Eta weather model.  The resulting data is one of the most comprehensive and detailed historical weather data sets in existence today, providing a superb data set covering the entire North American land mass and adjacent oceans.

The NARR provides a cutting edge tool that offers unparalleled insight into the large scale and long term wind and weather patterns over North America , calculated using some of the most powerful computing systems in the world.  Nonetheless, because of the very large geographic domain and the very long reanalysis period, the NARR is limited to a horizontal resolution of 32 km.  While this resolution is sufficient to characterize large scale features and trends over a long period, it is not sufficient to capture all of the medium and small scale effects that are necessary to assess the winds for a small wind project.

That's where smallwind.com's WindCheck product comes in - it takes the large scale data from the NARR and brings it down to the medium and small scale, providing the level of detail needed for a small wind project.

Learn more about the WindCheck process or see a sample WindCheck report.