This C3S project was one of their Sectoral Information Service flagship projects, for the Energy Sector.
One of the aims of the project was to produce datasets for the Energy Sector. This included the developers of solar and wind energy farms, transmission companies and power companies. Making climate/weather data from ECMWF more available (easier format and bias adjusted) to this sector is important.

Companies in the sector (small and large) are not fully aware of what weather/climate data are available. Those that are often say that ERA-Interim doesn’t agree with the wind speed data they have from their wind farm. The fact that most don’t make their data available is an issue we’re also trying to address, partly by making ERA-Interim more user friendly and bias adjusted.

The trouble with what ECMWF provide is that it is hard for many to download, the reduced Gaussian grid was awkward for most and it’s hard to avoid the data volumes getting too large.

Our bias-adjustment exercise was described in the paper. What most small scale users do is to compare their local measurements with ERA-Interim and then either point out it doesn’t agree or try a range of bias adjustment procedures. What we’ve done is to apply a consistent bias-adjustment scheme across our European domain, using different distributional adjustments depending on the variable.

The data are not just useful in the Energy Sector, but could also be used by the Water and Agriculture sectors, where the variables: air temperature, precipitation, solar irradiance, wind speed and relative humidity are the key variables.

ECMWF have archived ERA-Interim, but not the bias adjusted version, nor the raw data gridded on a latitude/longitude grid.