Going back to the 1920's and 1930's, shelterbelts were important. As near as I can tell, all of the findings are designed for places where there are little or no elevation changes, and winds are never that strong anyway.

I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and about 5 miles upwind from me is a 100+ MW wind farm. And in the 40 or so years since I went to high school and seed the pasture here, my upwind neighbours have been cutting down the aspen/poplar that nominally form the typical farm woodlot here.

I want to model what the wind direction/speed is likely to be here, and then design a shelterbelt for my dugout to minimize summer evaporation and maximize winter snow capture.

Applied Math Body and Soul likes FENICS, and they seem to think it applicable to microweather problems. I have run across NinjaWind, and started to build it. I have a bunch of data to build a DEM, but that isn't finished yet.

Are there other models I should be looking at?

At present, I have 16 CPU cores (all AMD64) and 4 GPUs.

Thanks.

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No bites, eh?

I have a response from the wind farm, they want to know more about what I am doing. I still don't know what I am doing with certainty.

A friend brought up carbon sequestration.

There is an argument that everything that is growing on a farm, should be planned. Which can mean planning where a tree gets planted, what kind of tree, how long we let it live, how we manage its growth. One person in Manitoba, is raising willows which are periodically "harvested" (coppicing or pollarding). In his instance, I believe the plan is to burn the willow produced.

In permaculture, a person might bury the wood (hugelkulture). Hugelkulture probably has more immediate use in terms of carbon sequestration.

Growing a raspberry bush isn't going to influence microclimate significantly. Growing a Burr Oak should influence microclimate a lot. Some places may be able to grow fast growing species that need ongoing management such as Paulownia (I believe in optimum climate, it can grow to 20 feet in its first or second year).

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Hi Fortran,

Just as a comment - I think this thread should be in CafeCPDN - very interesting, but not a crunching issue.

I am misunderstanding number crunching then. If people know of other models with available source code I should look at, I was hoping for suggestions. Or maybe they know fenics or NinjaWind won't do what I want? Even if I find source code, if some of this needs to run on GPUs, that means I have to write code (probably OpenCL) to do that part.

But, if someone wants to move this thread, okay.

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There have been projects within CPDN that look at aspects of the natural world other than temperature and rainfall. Here's one, for example: Forest Mortality, Economics, and Climate in Western North America (FMEC).

However, the resolution of the models is much larger than what you are contemplating. Recent models have got down to 25 km grid spacing, which is still much too coarse for your needs. The software itself has been developed by the U.K. Met Office - and is huge. So the projects are created by professional climate scientists around the world and run by volunteers here, but we don't have access to the source code itself.

I should have been more explicit. When I said 'crunching' I meant CPDN crunching.
You seem to be wanting to write a model to simulate the local topography and wind conditions so I thought other forums might generate more interest.

AS Iain said, the CPDN code is very complex, running to millions of lines of Fortran and is not accessable.

I would have thought that even WindNinja is too macro for your purposes although I don't know what scale you are thinking of. Perhaps a 'back of an envelope' design might be appropriate, based on prevailing wind conditions.
Best of luck.

PS There's good information on windbreaks here. https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=624