As part of a collaboration project with Natural Resources Canada, the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) is working on improving ramp and icings forecasts for wind and solar energy. The more accurate and reliable those forecasts will be, the more efficient will the integration of renewables and associated energy storage solutions become. To this effect, 2.5 km resolution gridded forecasts over the Gaspé peninsula and the Maritimes, as well as 1km resolution forecasts over a smaller area, are run 4 times a day, where wind and radiation variables are output every 3 minutes to better predict the onset and end of ramps. High-resolution icing gridded forecasts are also produced. These baseline forecasts are made available freely to the public through a WMS server analog to the MSC’s GeoMet API for geospatial web services, where they can be visualized. Python scripts are also made available to facilitate the extraction of the actual forecasts. With such scripts, users can access time series of variables at the location of their choice without the need to download large and process large files themselves.
