Enhancing the accuracy of spatio-temporal models for wind speed prediction by incorporating bias-corrected crowdsourced data

Accurate high-resolution spatial and temporal wind speed data is critical for estimating the wind energy potential of a location. For real-time wind speed prediction, statistical models typically depend on high-quality (near) real-time data from official meteorological stations to improve forecasting accuracy. Personal weather stations (PWS) offer an additional source of real-time data and broader spatial coverage than official stations. However, they are not subject to rigorous quality control and may exhibit bias or measurement errors. This article presents a framework for incorporating PWS data into statistical models for validated official meteorological station data via a two-stage approach. First, bias correction is performed on PWS wind speed data using reanalysis data. Second, we implement a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal model that accounts for varying measurement error in the PWS data. This enables wind speed prediction across a target area, and is particularly beneficial for improving predictions in regions sparse in official monitoring stations. Our results show that including bias-corrected PWS data improves prediction accuracy compared with using meteorological station data alone, with a 5% reduction in prediction error on average across all sites. The results are comparable with popular reanalysis products, but unlike these numerical weather models our approach is available in real-time and offers improved uncertainty quantification.