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Statistics of wind direction and its increments

Phys. Fluids 12, 1529 (2000); doi:10.1063/1.870401

Issue Date: June 2000

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Eric van Doorn, Brindesh Dhruva, and Katepalli R. Sreenivasan
Mason Laboratory, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8286

Victor Cassella
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973
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. ©2000 American Institute of Physics.
History: Received 26 March 1999; accepted 6 March 2000
Permalink: http://link.aip.org/link/?PHFLE6/12/1529/1
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KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords
PACS
  • 92.60.Gn
    Hydrospheric and atmospheric geophysics Meteorology Winds and their effects
  • 05.40.Jc
    Statistical physics, thermodynamics, and nonlinear dynamical systems Fluctuation phenomena, random processes, noise, and Brownian motion Brownian motion
  • 02.50.-r
    Mathematical methods in physics Probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics
  • YEAR: 2000

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN:
1070-6631 (print)   1089-7666 (online)
Publisher:
AIP is a member of CrossRef AIP

REFERENCES (11)
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