What are some good databases of wind speed and direction to use as training data for machine learning?

Question

I am fairly new to machine learning, but what I am trying to do is predict energy output of a wind turbine based on a data set of wind speed and direction, and ideally turbulence and shear.

Do you know what type of data I need? I know I need a database of wind speed, direction, and possibly turbulence and shear. My questions are as follows:

Do you know of a specific database I can use with wind data and files I can download for my algorithm? So far I have these two sites:
- 50-meter wind from National Renewable Energy Laboratory
- NOAA Federal Climate Complex Integrated Surface Data Inventory
Are these good options? Can I download one of these files to use in MATLAB?
Do I also need data of past energy outputs of the wind turbines I am focusing on (for comparison of my prediction with the actual data)?
Might neural networks and SVM algorithms suit the purpose of predicting wind energy output?

Thank you!!

Please given some more information: Do you want to have measurement or modelling data? Do you need it for a specific location or for a wider area? Does it need to be US data or can it be also European data? — daniel.heydebreck, Dec 01 '16 at 08:58
To question 1: When you are interested in modelling data, coastDat2 is a source for European modeling data. To question 2: Yes, you can load them into MATLAB (you can load every text file into MATLAB). However, writing the file's content sensibly into variables needs a bit preparation. The format is well described here. To question 4: what did you find out so far on your own to answer this question? — daniel.heydebreck, Dec 01 '16 at 09:03
Do you have experience in importing such text files into MATLAB or generally importing/parsing such text files? — daniel.heydebreck, Dec 01 '16 at 09:05
Similar question as What is a good database containing wind speed and direction?. — daniel.heydebreck, Dec 02 '16 at 11:56
I marked this as closed because there are too many questions, and most of which are related to machine learning instead of open data. Additionally, there are already answered questions on this site regarding wind speed and power, see for example http://opendata.stackexchange.com/q/4412/1511 — philshem, Dec 03 '16 at 08:24

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 01 '16 at 20:27

You can download wind data in many different temporal resolutions from the Weather Underground, wunderground.com.

To get the data from Berlin-Tegel Airport TXL, I can do

https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/TXL/2016/5/5/DailyHistory.html?format=1

and get

TimeCEST,TemperatureC,Dew PointC,Humidity,Sea Level PressurehPa,VisibilityKm,Wind Direction,Wind SpeedKm/h,Gust SpeedKm/h,Precipitationmm,Events,Conditions,WindDirDegrees,DateUTC
12:20 AM,9.0,1.0,58,1029,-9999.0,North,5.6,-,N/A,,Clear,360,2016-05-04 22:20:00
12:50 AM,9.0,1.0,58,1029,-9999.0,North,5.6,-,N/A,,Clear,360,2016-05-04 22:50:00
1:20 AM,8.0,2.0,66,1029,-9999.0,North,5.6,-,N/A,,Clear,350,2016-05-04 23:20:00
1:50 AM,5.0,1.0,76,1029,-9999.0,Variable,3.7,-,N/A,,Clear,0,2016-05-04 23:50:00
2:20 AM,6.0,1.0,70,1029,-9999.0,Variable,3.7,-,N/A,,Clear,0,2016-05-05 00:20:00
2:50 AM,6.0,1.0,70,1029,-9999.0,Variable,1.9,-,N/A,,Clear,0,2016-05-05 00:50:00
3:20 AM,6.0,2.0,76,1029,-9999.0,Variable,3.7,-,N/A,,Clear,0,2016-05-05 01:20:00

I know this data source from the R package weatherData. Haven't used this data much. Cannot tell how accurate this data is, qhat the quotas/rate limits are, if there are gaps, etc.

What are some good databases of wind speed and direction to use as training data for machine learning?

1 Answers1