NbS: Analyse wind risk

When identifying the risk of non-permanent, an important natural risk to consider is wind. This template project allows us to look at areas impacted by high winds over the past 20 years, allowing you to see, plan for, and act on the potential risk of wind damage to the forest in your project site. The workflow calculates the number of years in which high winds occurred within a pixel area (11km square). The example area is Cambodia, but you can choose whatever country (or area) is of interest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Summary Description
• What should I use this template for?
• What data has been used?
• What do the outputs show me?
  • Map Outputs
  • Dashboard Outputs
• What are the blocks used in the workflow?

Demonstration Video

What should I use this template for?

You should use this template project to look at historical wind speeds for a given location. This could either be a large area (as in this example, where we are looking at Cambodia) or in one or more project sites (here we are looking at 5 different project sites).

High Winds can be defined in different ways, depending on the country or region.  In this example template, the default is set at 2 m/s. That is, a year is categorised as having had high winds if the maximum wind speeds exceeded 2 m/s. The calculator block allows you to define your own threshold. 

What data has been used?

This template uses the ERA5-Land climate dataset. It is a reanalysis dataset providing a consistent view of the evolution of land variables over several decades at an enhanced resolution compared to ERA5. 

ERA5-Land has been produced by replaying the land component of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 climate reanalysis. Reanalysis combines model data with observations from across the world into a globally complete and consistent dataset. Reanalysis produces data that go several decades back in time, providing an accurate description of the climate of the past. This dataset contains 50 climate variables. The data used here is a subset of the full ERA5-Land dataset post-processed by ECMWF. 

This dataset does not make future predictions regarding changes to wind speeds but rather allows you to see historical data to understand the long-term trends for your particular location.

What do the outputs show me?

Map Outputs

This template project has only one map output layer. This shows the total number of high-wind years for each pixel (since 2003).  The colour scale will default to min-max so that purple corresponds to no years of high-wind and dark red to the highest number of high-wind years. See the legend to determine what that value is.  You can adjust the scale using the setting button on the Add Map Layer block.  

Dashboard Outputs

For this template, the dashboard tab will show a chart and table with the maximum value (of the pixels) for high-wind years in each project area. Charts can be downloaded as an image using the download button at the bottom-left of the chart. You will have the choice of downloading them as an image, or the underlying data as a CSV spreadsheet. Tables can also be downloaded as a CSV spreadsheet using the download button at the bottom-left of the table. This is true of all charts and tables created with Earth Blox.