A west wind climate simulation of the mountainous Yukon

Abstract The wind climate of the mountainous terrain in the southern Yukon is simulated using the Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit (WEST) developed by the Recherche en Prevision Numerique (RPN) group of Environment Canada and is compared to measurements in the field. WEST combines two models that operate at different spatial scales. The Mesoscale Compressible Community (MC2) model is a mesoscale numerical weather prediction model that produces simulations over large domains of the order of a thousand kilometres. The MC2 model uses long‐term synoptic scale wind climate data from the analysis of radiosonde and other observations to simulate mean wind fields at tens of metres above the ground using a horizontal resolution of a few kilometres. The mesoscale results are used as input to MS‐Micro/3 (Mason and Sykes (1979) version of the Jackson and Hunt (1975) model version for microcomputers/3‐dimensional; MS‐Micro hereafter), a more computer‐efficient, microscale model with simpler linearized momentum equations...