The main objective of IEA R&D Wind Annex XVII - Database on Wind Characteristics - has been to provide wind energy planners, designers and researchers, as well as the international wind engineering community in general, with a source of actual wind field data (time series and resource data) observed in a wide range of different wind climates and terrain types. Connected to an extension of the initial Annex period, the scope for the continuation was widened to include also support to the international wind turbine standardisation efforts. The project partners are Sweden, Norway, U.S.A., The Netherlands and Denmark, with Denmark as the Operating Agent. The reporting of the continuation of Annex XVII falls in two separate parts. Part one accounts in details for the available data in the established database bank, and part two describes various data analyses performed with the overall purpose of improving the design load cases with relevance for to wind turbine structures. The present report constitutes the first part of the Annex XVII reporting. Basically, the database bank contains four categories of data, i.e. i) high sampled wind field time series; ii) high sampled wind turbine structural response time series; iii) wind resource data; and iv) wind farm data. The main emphasis, however, is on category i). The available data, within each of the four categories, are described in details. The description embraces site characteristics, terrain type, measurement set-up and the amount of available data.

Funded by the Danish Energy Agency: ENS-1363/02-0013