A newly formed thematic group focused on renewable energy participated in “The Final Countdown” Hackathon, which took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from March 24th to 28th, 2025. The event brought together climate scientists and private stakeholders from the renewable energy sector, such as Statkraft AS from Norway, Vestas Wind Systems AS from Denmark, and Anemos from Germany. In total, seven participants were part of this group that sought after ways to use nextGEMS data for renewable energy applications.

The renewable energy group focused on extreme winds, among other aspects, by looking at how they will change during the years until 2050. Extreme wind is associated with different weather events and phenomena, such as tropical cyclones or storms. Emilie Byermoen, a team member from the Norwegian firm Starkraft, pointed out their work at the hackathon was based on experimentation, as the participants tried to test possible real-world future scenarios with the models. For instance, by warming the ocean temperatures and observing how that will influence wind patterns in the years ahead — an exercise of special relevance considering the raising temperatures of our planet.

As the stakeholders attempted to discover how to use the nextGEMS in real planning for 20, 30, or 40 years ahead, climate scientists like Lukas Brunner contributed to the group, assisting with data and technical support for the industry representatives. Since nextGEMS data is new, very domain-specific, and large in volume, collaboration between diverse experts was advantageous, according to Brunner. 

For Starkraft representative Emilie Byermoen, “talking with the scientists about the problems they encounter when they work with the nextGEMS data, just chatting to get their opinion on its quality and what it is useful for” was very valuable. “It is something you would not get if you send an email, but rather from informal interactions,” she emphasized.

Indeed, one of the main challenges within the renewable energy team was understanding the data. “There are many specific technical aspects that I didn’t understand, although I am used to work with similar formats, but not this exact one,” Byermoenexplained. Nevertheless, the nextGEMS data seemed to hold great potential. For instance, in the case of wind speeds and rain, looking at extreme levels in the future is specially beneficial to observe at higher resolutions than traditional climate models. 

Despite its complexities, the nextGEMS models offer increased spatial resolution at 10, 5, and even less kilometers, unlike typical models that have 100 or even 200 km-scale resolutions. “I think this is what excites the industry partners about the data: for them 100 km is way too coarse to look at wind speeds or assess wind turbines placements, probably that is not a very helpful scale,” Brunner added.

In this years Scientific image contest 2022 held by Helmholtz Imaging of the Helmholtz Association one of our nextGEMS members Nikolay Koldunov from AWI won the 1st place for his contribution „Europe in winds“!

The image shows wind gusts over Europe as simulated by the nextGEMS climate model IFS with a 4km spatial resolution in the atmosphere. Wind gusts are overlayed by the zonal wind component for shading, which is plotted in gray-scale and made transparent. There is no explicit plotting of land, the high resolution allows for the land to „shine through“ due to larger surface friction and hence smaller wind speeds. The darker the area the smaller the wind is.

This particular image has several interesting features:
(i) a long stretch (hundreds of kilometers) of relatively calm winds in the wake of Jan Meyen island,
(ii) atmospheric fronts stretching for thousands of kilometers across the North Atlantic Ocean, and
(iii) strong winds in the Adriatic including a Bora event.

Visualisations like this will help scientists to identify and analyse interesting weather events, including extreme events, extract corresponding information from the modelling system and develop better understanding of Earth’s weather and climate.

If you have further questions about this image, feel free to contact Nikolay.