  Facing increasing domestic energy consumption from population growth and
industrialization, Saudi Arabia is aiming to reduce its reliance on fossil
fuels and to broaden its energy mix by expanding investment in renewable energy
sources, including wind energy. A preliminary task in the development of wind
energy infrastructure is the assessment of wind energy potential, a key aspect
of which is the characterization of its spatio-temporal behavior. In this study
we examine the impact of internal climate variability on seasonal wind power
density fluctuations over Saudi Arabia using 30 simulations from the Large
Ensemble Project (LENS) developed at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research. Furthermore, a spatio-temporal model for daily wind speed is proposed
with neighbor-based cross-temporal dependence, and a multivariate skew-t
distribution to capture the spatial patterns of higher order moments. The model
can be used to generate synthetic time series over the entire spatial domain
that adequately reproduce the internal variability of the LENS dataset.
