Revisiting the estimation of extreme wind speed considering directionality

Abstract

In the estimation of extreme wind speed, the effect of wind direction is usually ignored. Nevertheless, as a vital parameter of the wind, it should be reasonably taken into consideration. Nowadays, the influence of wind direction can be considered through directional wind speed or directly regarding it as a variable. Based on wind speed data of climate stations, the wind directions are divided into uniform and non-uniform sectors. Copula function is then applied to establish the joint distribution of directional wind speed. The effect of the partition of directional sectors is discussed subsequently. Meanwhile, a joint distribution model of wind speed and wind direction based on copula function is also set up. According to the joint distribution, extreme wind speeds under specified wind directions are estimated based on conditional probability. Besides, extreme wind speeds considering wind directionality based on the aforementioned two methods are compared. Results show that the classification of wind direction will affect the estimation of extreme wind speed. In addition, the estimation of extreme wind speed under specified wind direction based on the joint distribution of wind speed and wind direction does not reflect the actual wind characteristics. Through the comparison of different methods considering directionality, the result based on the joint distribution of directional wind speed seems more reasonable.