The increasing need of renewable energy in Europe has lead to the growth of wind farms both off-shore and over complex terrains. For the latter, hills, forestry and in general surface inhomogeneities make the wind-resource assessment more challenging than in off-shore sites. There are several open issues that are now investigated by the wind-energy community to improve the current evaluation methodologies and, simultaneously, to increase the physical understanding of such complex flow scenarios.

EUROMECH Colloquium 576 is motivated by the need to gather researchers actively working in the wind-energy field, to compare the available experimental/numerical/analytical techniques and propose new ideas to improve the current know-how.

Various fundamental and applied aspects of the site-assessment process will be discussed, with particular focus on the effect of complex terrains (forests, hills, inhomogeneous surface roughness, etc.) on the available wind resource and its prediction with the current evaluation methods. Furthermore, the Colloquium will try to assess the effect of interacting wind-turbine wakes embedded in the highly-turbulent flow resulting from the roughness presence.