Estimation of extreme wind speeds with very long return periods

Abstract

Long series of hourly mean wind speeds and the maximum hourly 3-s gust are simulated for four sites in the British Isles in order to investigate methods for the determination of extreme wind speed events. The simulation is performed using a one-step Markov chain model. First, the observations are used to generate series of the same length as the real time series. It is found that the synthetic series reproduce well the means, standard deviations, and maximum and minimum wind speeds of the observed series. As expected, they are less successful at reproducing the observed autocorrelation properties with the lagged correlation coefficients decaying too rapidly in the simulated series. The method is then used to generate synthetic series of 10, 50, 100, 1000, and 10 000 years in length. -from Authors