Wind speed at fifty metres and its power density for every cell, with the shear exponent and the windiest month, a per-governorate table with resource class, and a full monthly table.
The national mean speed is 5.7 m/s and power density 197.7 W/m2.
In short
The national mean speed at fifty metres is 5.7 m/s and mean power density 197.7 W/m2.
The highest and lowest resource governorates are listed in the table.
The windiest month differs by region, as the monthly table shows.
Who it is for
Wind project developers, consultancies, energy engineering departments, planning and research bodies.
Method: what we add to the raw data
- Speeds at ten and fifty metres come from an open global climate archive on a one-degree grid, densified by inverse-distance weighting.
- Power density scales with the cube of speed, not with speed, which is why it is the measure sites are actually classed by.
- Only mean speed is available, not its distribution, so density was estimated assuming a Rayleigh distribution, the standard assumption when only the mean is known.
- Air density is taken as 1.1 kg/m3 rather than the standard 1.225, because the Saudi climate is hot and much of the land is elevated; lighter air yields less power at the same speed.
- The shear exponent comes from the ratio of the two speeds, an indicator of surface roughness.
- Classes use the power-density bounds conventional in wind atlases.
Product details
| What you get | 1 spatial layer in GeoPackage, 3 GeoTIFF rasters, 2 CSV tables, lyrx and qml symbology for ArcGIS Pro and QGIS, a PNG map at 220 dpi, and an Arabic and English guide |
|---|---|
| Formats | GPKG, GeoTIFF, CSV, lyrx, qml, PNG |
| Coordinate system | WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) |
| Licence | Commercial use allowed for you and the organisation you buy for; no resale or redistribution |
| Delivery | A private download link valid for 24 hours, within 6 hours of payment confirmation |
| Package size | ZIP 2.9 MB |
| Personal data | The product contains no personal data |
Spatial layers
governorates_wind— polygons, 121: Governorates with their wind resource
Raster files (GeoTIFF)
D125_wind_speed_50m.tif— 1,055 × 803, about 2 km: Wind speed at 50 mD125_power_density_50m.tif— 1,055 × 803, about 2 km: Wind power densityD125_wind_shear.tif— 1,055 × 803, about 2 km: Wind shear exponent
Tables
D125_governorates_wind.csv— 121 rows: Wind resource per governorateD125_monthly_by_governorate.csv— 1,452 rows: Monthly speed per governorate
Limitations
- This is a first resource screening, not a site assessment: building a wind farm requires on-site mast measurement for at least a year, which no map replaces.
- The Rayleigh assumption is an approximation: a site whose wind concentrates in short seasons has a different power density from what this assumption gives.
- The climate source grid has cells of about one hundred kilometres, densified here by inverse-distance weighting for display; densifying smooths boundaries, it adds no new observation. It is weakest along the Sarawat escarpment, where a few kilometres separate highland at two thousand metres from Tihama at sea level, both inside one cell.
- Modern towers exceed one hundred metres and speed at fifty metres is lower, so these figures are a floor for what modern turbines see.
- Local obstacles and fine terrain that accelerate or shelter the wind are not included.
FAQ
- How long does delivery take?
- Up to 6 hours after payment is confirmed.
- How long does the download link last?
- 24 hours, and it is renewed free on request.
- Can I get a refund?
- Digital products are not refundable once downloaded — unless the file is defective or does not match the description, in which case it is replaced or fully refunded.
- What does the licence allow?
- Commercial use is allowed for you and the organisation you buy for; resale or redistribution is not.