Feng Ye, Xinxi Zhang, Michael Stein et al.
To unlock access to stronger winds, the offshore wind industry is advancing towards significantly larger and taller wind turbines. This massive upscaling motivates a departure from wind forecasting methods that traditionally focused on a single representative height. To fill this gap, we propose DeepMIDE--a statistical deep learning method which jointly models the offshore wind speeds across space, time, and height. DeepMIDE is formulated as a multi-output integro-difference equation model with a multivariate nonstationary kernel characterized by a set of advection vectors that encode the physics of wind field formation and propagation. Embedded within DeepMIDE, an advanced deep learning architecture learns these advection vectors from high-dimensional streams of exogenous weather information, which, along with other parameters, are plugged back into the statistical model for probabilistic multi-height space-time forecasting. Tested on real-world data from offshore wind energy areas in the Northeastern United States, the wind speed and power forecasts from DeepMIDE are shown to outperform those from prevalent time series, spatio-temporal, and deep learning methods.