Report on hierarchy of benchmarks

This report describes the validation directed program that will guide the planning of experiments and model development activities of NEWA. The program follows a formal verification and validation (V&V) framework originally developed by Sandia National Laboratory. It has two phases: the integrated planning and the experimental and modeling planning and execution. This report deals with the first phase where the aim is the identification of the relevant phenomena of the model-chain that will be necessary to meet the application objectives, and the hierarchy of validation exercises (also called benchmarks) that will be done in order to demonstrate how the model-chain actually integrates those phenomena. The benchmarks hierarchy is defined in terms of three dimensions: the observational dataset from which the validation data is extracted, the part of the model-chain that is being addressed and the validation objectives. These objectives are related to the phenomena of interest for the given application, in this case, with the development of a mesoscale to microscale model-chain for wind conditions assessment. The result is a planning instrument that will provide guidance to the data gathering activities in WP2, and help with the coordination of the work within WP3 to deliver a validated methodology for the production of the New European Wind Atlas and associated modeling tools. This initial planning is subject to change depending on the success of the observational data collection from the experiments and the call for wind data