Geomatics (MID/MIF files)

The Wind Atlas is designed such that its products can be imported in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for multifactor analyses and decision making by the wind energy industry. As a common format, we chose the MID/MIF standard of MapInfo, which is handled by several GIS software.

The coordinate chosen for the MID/MIF matches that of the mesoscale simulation, i.e. Polar Stereographic with 5km resolution at 60 North. This corresponds to a coordsys clause:
CoordSys Earth Projection 20, 999, 12, 0, 0, 0, 7, -100.0000, 90, 0.9330127, 0, 0

The meridian 100 W coincides with the y axis. A spherical Earth is chosen above, with a radius of 6371.22 km.

The GIS files contain a subset of the parameters available in the standard files, i.e.:
E1, EU, EU2, E2, ME, MG, 2B, LA, LO.
Each mesoscale value is represented as a rectangular geographical object using the RECT (angle) clause.

Caveat: in MapInfo, one has to exercise care in overlaying these MID/MIF files with other layers defined, for instance on a NAD83 geoid. Without care, features can become shifted laterally by tens of kilometers. This can be avoided by not mixing geoid-based layers with our spherical-based Atlas data; for instance, one can reproject the offending layer data to datum-less latitude longitude grids, which will overlay properly with our data. For more information, see the Questions & Answers page, more particularly "What is the procedure of import in MapInfo of the downloaded MID/MIF files?".