Mapping mean annual icing hours for the Quebec wind energy industry

摘要

This paper presents a first icing map for the southern part of the province of Quebec which illustrates the combined precipitation and in-cloud icing hours. The paper starts by applying different methods of predicting icing events to the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data. The results are then compared to icing observations from airport data. This comparison indicates that the method using temperature and relative humidity as parameters shows the best correlation between the predicted annual icing hours and the observed annual icing hours. This method is therefore used to produce the icing map. Although the mapping method has its limitations and that further development is desirable, this first mapping attempt shows some agreement with available observations.