Statistics of wind direction and its increments
- 1 June 2000
- journal article
- Published by AIP Publishing in Physics of Fluids
- Vol. 12 (6), 1529-1534
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.870401
Abstract
We study some elementary statistics of wind direction fluctuations in the atmosphere for a wide range of time scales (10 −4 sec to 1 h ), and in both vertical and horizontal planes. In the plane parallel to the ground surface, the direction time series consists of two parts: a constant drift due to large weather systems moving with the mean wind speed, and fluctuations about this drift. The statistics of the direction fluctuations show a rough similarity to Brownian motion but depend, in detail, on the wind speed. This dependence manifests itself quite clearly in the statistics of wind-direction increments over various intervals of time. These increments are intermittent during periods of low wind speeds but Gaussian-like during periods of high wind speeds.Keywords
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