Wind Science and Engineering. Origins, Developments, Fundamentals and Advancements

Abstract

This chapter addresses wind knowledge between the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. First, it examines the evolution of ground-level and upper air measurements, emphasising the revolution related to the appearance of remote monitoring. It then discusses the understanding and forecasting of circulation phenomena on a planetary scale, highlighting the dualism between the deterministic and probabilistic view, and the genesis of wind classification, underlining the existence of various phenomena with different space and timescales. Later on, it addresses the growing importance given to the physical processes that occur in the thin atmospheric belt in contact with the Earth surface, which originated micrometeorology and the two turbulence representations that arose in this period: the phenomenological and the statistical theory. In turn, they produced the first models of the wind speed close to the ground that took place through a mixture interfacing theory, experience and empiricism. Finally, this chapter addresses wind climatology and the first distributions of the wind speed.