Selected Upper-Air Wind Speed Distributions

摘要

Some weapon systems are sensitive to winds in the lower part of the atmosphere.Wind speed distributions and random wind speeds derived from the distributions are often required to help determine the operational capabilities of these systems. A literature survey revealed that investigators usually used either a log-normal or a Weibull distribution as the model for the distribution of wind speeds independent of direction. In addition to these two distributions, a gamma distribution is also evaluated in this report. Wind speeds observed in three different geographical regions at 10 altitudes up to 5 km 3 diurnal time periods, and 5 seasonal time periods were evaluated. This report contains the results of the wind speed analysis for some of the combinations of altitude, diurnal time periods, and seasonal time periods for each of the three geographical regions--European Lowlands, European Highlands, and Mideast Desert. The observed wind speed distributions were adequately represented by the analytical istributions.