Vortex’s approach is based on moving the traditional wind modeling effort and its required expertise from your office to our computer cluster and specialist team, respectively.
We believe that making the whole process web-based means it is faster and more efficient. It allows for much more powerful results than in-house software and is considerably quicker (and much more affordable) than a typical consultancy process.
Remote computing
Vortex's business model is innovative: remote computing. You don't need to buy expensive hardware, be a modeling expert or go through a slow consultancy process. Run our technology remotely and get your results in a matter of hours.
Top-down modeling approach
In short, our technology reverses the traditional wind modeling process (where wind measurements at one point are extended to cover a larger area) by down-scaling wind patterns over large-areas to your particular points of interest (irrespective whether or not you have measurements there) using the power of a supercomputer cluster.
Web-based (SaaS)
Vortex's modeling chain starts and ends at our INTERFACE which runs on a web-browser and is not used to perform calculations. That is why it requires such little computing power and will work on any standard computer connected to the Internet.
The power behind Vortex technology is our server cluster which runs seven days a week, 365 days a year to do the hard work for you.
Past & Present
Vortex downscaling procedures start with two large-scale datasets: Present and Past, extracted from NCEP and NASA reanalysis databases, two ambitious data assimilation projects that proces meteorological measurements worldwide.
The main purpose of the Present (2007-2012) dataset is to allow your data to be compared against our results in order to get a quantitative estimation of accuracy of modeling in your particular case.
The Past dataset contains atmospheric statistics for the last 30 years and is used as an estimation of the long-term wind climate. Both datasets have been compiled using the same proprietary algorithms in order to guarantee a coherence between both short-term (checkable) and long-term results.
Macro, Meso & Micro scales
Vortex datasets cover the world at low resolution (9km grid) and their mean values are freely displayable. When you select a specific area and launch a Run (via Vortex INTERFACE), these datasets are down-scaled by WRF to wind farm resolutions by a nested Macro-Meso-Microscale modeling cascade performed by our supercomputer cluster.
An important characteristic of our down-scaling method is that it makes use of non-linear modeling during all steps of the process. This is the reason why Vortex does not offer (like other companies do) pre-computed maps downloadable from a website.
Ensemble
Another reason for Vortex’s computational time is that, each time you execute an order, WRF is run using several configurations of its input parameters (the so-called ensemble), which enables model uncertainty to be estimated. This uncertainty rate is then provided to customers as a measure of the stability of the simulation for each particular application.
High resolution
Vortex’s modeling chain nests several domains down to the Microscale, using increasingly finer information. The final results are provided for a 3" arc (roughly 100m) since this is the resolution of the worldwide available SRTM orography database. The values of terrain roughness are extracted from ESA satellite land use cover.
