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4. BC-HRRR CONUS 60-minute (NOAA + NREL)

BC-HRRR CONUS 60-minute (NOAA + NREL) (/api/wind-toolkit/v2/wind/wtk-bchrrr-v1-0-0-download)

NREL processed NOAA's HRRR data to overcome limitations for wind energy use, such as missing timesteps, low resolution, and bias versus the WIND Toolkit. The resulting BC-HRRR dataset (2015-2023) ensures consistency through bias correction, enabling seamless use in grid integration studies alongside the WIND Toolkit and future scalability.

To address the need for regularly updated wind resource data, NREL has processed the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) outputs for use in grid integration modeling. The HRRR is an hourly-updated operational forecast product produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Dowell et al., 2022).

Several barriers have prevented the HRRR's widespread proliferation in the wind energy industry: missing timesteps (prior to 2019), challenging file format for wind energy analysis, limited vertical height resolution, and negative bias versus legacy WIND Toolkit data (2007-2013). NREL has applied re-gridding, interpolation, and bias-correction to the native HRRR data to overcome these limitations. This results in the now-publicly-available bias corrected and interpolated HRRR (BC-HRRR) dataset for weather years 2015 to 2023.

Bias correction is necessary for wind resource consistency across weather years to be used simultaneously in planning-focused grid integration studies alongside the original WIND Toolkit data. We show that quantile mapping with the WIND Toolkit as a historical baseline is an effective method for bias correcting the interpolated HRRR data: the BC-HRRR has reduced mean bias versus comparable gridded wind resource datasets (+0.12 m/s versus Vortex) and has very low mean bias versus ground measurement stations (+0.01 m/s) (Buster et al., 2024).

BC-HRRR's consistency with the legacy WIND Toolkit allows NREL to extend grid integration analysis to 15+ weather years of wind data with low-overhead extensibility to future years as they are made available by NOAA. As with historical datasets like the WIND Toolkit, BC-HRRR is intended for use in grid integration modeling (e.g., capacity expansion, production cost, and resource adequacy modeling) both independently and alongside the legacy WIND Toolkit.

Request URL

GET|POST /api/wind-toolkit/v2/wind/wtk-bchrrr-v1-0-0-download.format?parameters

Request Parameters

NOTE: when using POST to submit a request the api_key must still be included as a query parameter in the url. All other parameters may be included in a POST request as part of the payload.

Response Fields

The response is composed of service-related informational fields and the results of the data query.

Data File Format

Generated data files are formatted in accordance with the Standard Time Series Data File Format. This file format has been developed to support SAM and other NREL models and is documented fully in this PDF. More information on SAM file formats available on the SAM weather page.

Examples

Examples may not reflect this specific dataset.

JSON Output Format

{
    "inputs": {
        "query": {
            "attributes": "winddirection_180m",
            "names": "2017",
            "utc": "false",
            "leap_day": "true",
            "email": "user@company.com",
            "wkt": "POLYGON((-130.756145509839060 48.75520578942107,-130.75571635639668 48.75520578942107,-130.75571635639668 48.75485477666326,-130.75614550983906 48.75485477666326,-130.75614550983906 48.75520578942107))"
        }
    },
    "metadata": {
        "version": "2.0.0",
        "resultset": {
          "count": 1
        }
    },
    "status": 200,
    "outputs": {
        "message": "File generation in progress. An email will be sent to user@company.com when the download is ready.",
        "downloadUrl": "https://mapfiles.nrel.gov/data/wind/ebc9bbbc34f91c65ac50707d43176c6c.zip"
    },
    "errors": []
}

CSV Output Format

Direct streaming of CSV data is supported for single location, single year only. The following response example is truncated after the first few rows of data.

SiteID,Site Timezone,Data Timezone,Longitude,Latitude,Country
80,-9,-9,-130.756,48.75498,b'Canada'
Year,Month,Day,Hour,Minute,wind direction at 180m (deg)
2017,1,1,0,0,347.18
2017,1,1,0,5,347.3
2017,1,1,0,10,347.40000000000003
2017,1,1,0,15,347.52
2017,1,1,0,20,347.66
2017,1,1,0,25,347.79
2017,1,1,0,30,348
2017,1,1,0,35,348.18
2017,1,1,0,40,348.35

POST request example in Python

import requests

url = "http://developer.nrel.gov/api/wind-toolkit/v2/wind/wtk-bchrrr-v1-0-0-download.json?api_key=yourapikeygoeshere"

payload = "api_key={{API_KEY}}&attributes=winddirection_180m&names=2017&utc=true&leap_day=true&interval=60&email=user@company.com&wkt=POINT(-179.99 -15.94)"

headers = {
    'content-type': "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
    'cache-control': "no-cache"
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, data=payload, headers=headers)

print(response.text)

Rate Limits

Rate limits for this application are significantly less than the standard rate limits for developer.nrel.gov. This decrease in the limit is required as the data provided through this service is significantly more computationally intensive to generate and provide. These rate limits are carefully calculated to allow all users the maximum throughput that our servers can sustain.

There are several levels of rate limiting for this service. The first limit determines how many requests a given user can make per 24 hour period. For requests utilizing the .csv format this rate limit is set at 5000 a day at a frequency of no more than 1 per second. For all other requests this limit is set at 1000 requests per day at a frequency of no more than 1 every 2 seconds.

Secondly each user is limited to 20 in-flight requests at any given time.

In addition, the service has a fail-safe mechanism to prevent significant performance decreases that can be caused by unexpectedly high usage of the service. This limit will cause the service to stop accepting requests when the queue reaches a point where additional requests will significantly lower server performance. When this limit is hit, the service will error with a message describing that the request queue is full.

For some tips and tricks to maximize data downloads please read the guide here.

Contact

For questions about the API or the data models please contact wind-toolkit@nrel.gov

Errors

Standard errors may be returned. In addition, the following service-specific errors may be returned: