Evaluating Ensemble Post-Processing for Wind Power Forecasts
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Capturing the uncertainty in probabilistic wind power forecasts is challenging, especially when uncertain input variables, such as the weather play a role. Since ensemble weather predictions aim to capture this uncertainty in the weather system accurately, they can be used to propagate this uncertainty through to subsequent wind power forecasting models. However, as weather ensemble systems are known to be biased and underdispersed, meteorologists post-process the ensembles. This post-processing can successfully correct the biases in the weather variables but has not been evaluated thoroughly in the context of subsequent forecasts, such as wind power generation. The present paper evaluates multiple strategies for applying ensemble post-processing to probabilistic wind power forecasts. We use Ensemble Model Output Statistics (EMOS) as the post-processing method and evaluate four possible strategies: only using the raw ensembles without post-processing, a one-step strategy where only the weather ensembles are post-processed, a one-step strategy where we only post-process the power ensembles, and a two-step strategy where we post-process both the weather and power ensembles. Results show that post-processing improves the probabilistic forecasting accuracy and that the post-processing of the final power ensemble forecast is the crucial step.
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