The Use of Wind Rose to Improve the Quality of Site Analysis

Abstract

Site analysis is the first step of building and environmental planning and design, which has to be done to get the aim of the design. There are many factors that should be analyzed in that step, and the wind, as one of the climate factors, is one of them. The importance of wind analysis is to formulate the concept of building facade and landscape, as well as building structure. This paper will concentrate on the first one. To formulate the concept of building and landscape, architects should know about wind, its types and categories. Designers commonly use wind data in a simple manner in their analysis. The need to enhance the quality analysis is urgent, which can be done by utilizing a wind rose diagram. Generating a wind rose diagram can be either manually or by using software. Several freeware can be obtained from the internet. The method used in this paper is the implementation of freeware called WRPLOT View Version 8.0.0., which depicts the wind direction and speed in a specific location and period of time. This paper will present how to produce a wind rose diagram by taking a sample wind data of Pekanbaru, Indonesia, which were obtained from Meteorology, Climate and Geophysics Board (BMKG) Riau Province. Analyzing the wind using wind rose diagram to produce the concept of building facade and landscape is a significant effort in improving the quality of analysis. Wind analysis using simple data, which usually contains incomplete information, gives less optimal results. It could be sufficient when it is applied in a small simple building plan, but neither in larger project nor in climate-related architectural project such as tropical and bio-climatic architecture. By using the wind data from wind rose graphic, in which the information is more complete, the quality of analysis will be improved. Finally, the author will show a simple example on how to implement wind rose in site analysis.