Renewable Energy, Vol.149, 66-79, 2020
Roughness classification utilizing remote sensing techniques for wind resource assessment
The rapid population growth and ever growing energy demand of Pakistan lead to economical downfall especially due to increase in its dependency on the import of petroleum products. Hence, the inclusion of alternate energy option is inevitable to the Country's energy mix as the current conventional energy sources i.e. fossil fuels, nuclear and mega-hydro are unable to meet this growing demand. To develop the wind energy based facilities, wind resource assessment is a must, and it is also depends on number of meteorological, geographical, geomorphological and other relevant variables. Terrain roughness is one of these variables and is essential wind resource assessment. Previously, terrain roughness is computed through the field surveys or by using field wind speed data. The current research study is conducted and emphasize the advancement in wind resource assessment through the utilization of modern computing aids like satellite remote sensing analyses (RSA) especially for terrain roughness classification. In this paper, a novel method for terrain roughness classification is developed by utilizing RSA techniques over satellite imageries. Since this roughness classification technique only depends on RSA, it is served as an alternate to conventional ground surveying methods and therefore is time-efficient & cost-effective. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.