February 2, 2021 Cornell wind energy scientists have released a new global wind atlas – a digital compendium filled with documented extreme wind speeds for all parts of the world – to help engineers select the turbines in any given region and accelerate the development of sustainable energy. This wind atlas is the first publicly available, uniform and geospatially explicit (datasets tied to locations) description of extreme wind speeds, according to the research, “A Global Assessment of Extreme Wind Speeds For Wind Energy Applications,” published Jan. 25 in Nature Energy. “Cost-efficient expansion of the wind-energy industry is enabled by access to this newly released digital atlas of the extreme wind conditions under which wind turbines will operate at locations around the world,” said Sara C. Pryor, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who authored the paper with Rebecca J. Barthelmie, professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Both are faculty fellows at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.