ANALYSIS OF SPATIALLY-VARYING WIND CHARACTERISTICS FOR DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

摘要

Design wind speeds for various return periods are provided in most national design codes throughout the world (e.g., NBCC 2010, ASCE 7-10). The design wind speeds are often based on an extreme value analysis of historical data obtained from a number of meteorological stations distributed over the region of interest. However, only the extreme wind speed magnitude is typically available to the designer, which does not provide information on the directional characteristics or underlying probability distribution of the wind. These parameters of the local wind characteristics may be useful for designers of directionally-sensitive structures or for higher-order reliability-based design. This paper describes an analysis of wind records obtained from discrete meteorological stations and the methods used to develop estimates of wind speed and directionality. The trends in wind speed and direction for a set of stations are also discussed. Following this, statistical wind parameters (including wind speed and direction) can be extracted for a number of locations within the study area. These values can be subsequently used to assess the reliability of one or more point structures, or a distributed system. The results are compared with those based on a traditional Gumbel (Type I) extreme value analysis for the same set of station data.