Representivity of wind measurements for design wind speed estimations

Abstract

The siting of wind measurement infrastructure has implications on the development of wind speed statistics for the design of the built environment. The South African Weather Service (SAWS) wind measurement network is considered to be typical of instrumentation sited according to World Meteorological Organization (WMO) requirements. With the advent of automatic weather station technology several decades ago, wind measurements have become much more cost-effective. While previously wind measurements were mostly restricted to airports with inherent good exposure, this is no longer the case. The impact of the positioning of anemometers on the representivity of the recorded data is demonstrated, motivating additional guidelines for the placement of wind recording infrastructure.