Wind Gust Characterization at Wind Turbine Relevant Heights in Moderately Complex Terrain
We advance new descriptive metrics of wind gusts and their parent probability distributions and lays the foundation for better methods to describe fatigue loading on structures and for downscaling wind gust climates. This research further illustrates substantial departures from the ‘Mexican hat’ description of gusts.
Wind gusts are coherent (transient) features within a turbulent wind field that are characterized by short-term wind speed increases. The force exerted by the wind scales with the square of the wind speed. Thus, improved understanding of wind gusts in complex terrain is critically important to design engineering and to possible impacts from climate variability and change.
This research uses analyses of observational data to improve understanding of wind gusts and aerodynamic loading on structures.