A post-processing of the wind speed of the regional reanalysis COSMO-REA6 in Central Europe is performed based on a combined physical and statistical approach. The physical basis is provided by downscaling wind speeds with the help of a diagnostic wind model, which reduces the horizontal grid point spacing by a factor of 8. The statistical correction using a neural network based on different variables of the reanalysis leads to an improvement of 30 % in RMSE compared to COSMO-REA6.

Correct estimates of wind speed between 60 and 200 m above ground are of great interest for the renewable energy sector. Observed wind speeds are compared to three different reanalyses. ERA5 and COSMO-REA6 outperform MERRA-2 at offshore, flat and hilly sites. Over land, ERA5 models nighttime wind speed better than COSMO-REA6 due to better representation of the low level jet through higher vertical resolution, a more comprehensive data assimilation scheme, and/or the more recent model version.

Access to high quality weather and climate data is crucial for a wide range of societal and economic issues. It allows optimising industrial processes with respect to efficiency. The goal of the research project FAIR is to simplify the information exchange between the DWD and economical players. This paper summarizes the results of the requirement analysis of three use cases and presents the deduced technical architecture and FAIR services aiming at a user-friendly exchange of weather data.

Irrigation affects the atmosphere and models are required to understand its full impact. However, there is no agreed procedure to describe irrigation within regional models. The present study introduces three new methods to integrate this process into the models and validates it for the Po Valley in northern Italy. All the tests done show that the results are improved with the new irrigation techniques when compared against some measures (e.g., temperature, potential evapotranspiration).

Reanalyses are long-term meteorological datasets that are based on numerical weather prediction models and the assimilation of historic observations. The regional model COSMO of Germany’s national meteorological service (Deutscher Wetterdienst) has been used to develop regional reanalyses with spatial resolution of up to 2 km. In this paper, we provide an overview of evaluation results and application examples at the European and national German level with a focus on renewable energy.