scholarly journals Statistical characteristics of convective wind gusts in Germany

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Mohr ◽  
Michael Kunz ◽  
Alexandra Richter ◽  
Bodo Ruck

Abstract. Due to the small-scale and non-stationary nature of the convective wind gusts usually associated with thunderstorms, there is a considerable lack of knowledge regarding their characteristics and statistics. In an effort to remedy this situation, we investigated in this study a set of 110 climate stations of the German Weather Service between 1992 and 2014 to analyze the temporal and spatial distribution, intensity, and occurrence probability of convective gusts. Similar to thunderstorm activity, the frequency of convective gusts decreases gradually from South to North Germany. No further spatial structures, such as a relation to orography or climate conditions, can be identified regarding their strength or likelihood. Rather, high wind speeds of above 30 m s−1 can be expected everywhere in Germany with almost similar occurrence probabilities. A comparison of the 20-year return values of convective gusts with those of turbulent gusts demonstrates that the latter have higher frequencies, especially in northern Germany. However, for higher return periods, this effect can be reversed at some stations. The values of the convective gust factors are mainly in a range between 1 and 4 but can even reach values up to 10. Besides the dependency from the averaging time period of the mean wind, the values of the gust factors additionally depend on the event duration and the storm type, respectively.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 957-969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Mohr ◽  
Michael Kunz ◽  
Alexandra Richter ◽  
Bodo Ruck

Abstract. Due to the small-scale and non-stationary nature of the convective wind gusts usually associated with thunderstorms, there is a considerable lack of knowledge regarding their characteristics and statistics. In an effort to remedy this situation, we investigated in this study a set of 110 climate stations of the German Weather Service between 1992 and 2014 to analyze the temporal and spatial distribution, intensity, and occurrence probability of convective gusts. Similar to thunderstorm activity, the frequency of convective gusts decreases gradually from southern to northern Germany. No further spatial structures, such as a relation to orography or climate conditions, can be identified regarding their strength or likelihood. Rather, high wind speeds of above 30 m s−1 can be expected everywhere in Germany with almost similar occurrence probabilities. A comparison of the 20-year return values of convective gusts with those of turbulent gusts demonstrates that the latter have higher frequencies, especially in northern Germany. However, for higher return periods, this effect can be reversed at some stations. The values of the convective gust factors are mainly in a range between 1 and 4 but can even reach values up to 10. Besides the dependency from the averaging time period of the mean wind, the values of the gust factors additionally depend on the event duration and the storm type, respectively.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2821-2833 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. G. Donat ◽  
T. Pardowitz ◽  
G. C. Leckebusch ◽  
U. Ulbrich ◽  
O. Burghoff

Abstract. A refined model for the calculation of storm losses is presented, making use of high-resolution insurance loss records for Germany and allowing loss estimates on a spatial level of administrative districts and for single storm events. Storm losses are calculated on the basis of wind speeds from both ERA-Interim and NCEP reanalyses. The loss model reproduces the spatial distribution of observed losses well by taking specific regional loss characteristics into account. This also permits high-accuracy estimates of total cumulated losses, though slightly underestimating the country-wide loss sums for storm "Kyrill", the most severe event in the insurance loss records from 1997 to 2007. A larger deviation, which is assigned to the relatively coarse resolution of the NCEP reanalysis, is only found for one specific rather small-scale event, not adequately captured by this dataset. The loss model is subsequently applied to the complete reanalysis period to extend the storm event catalogue to cover years when no systematic insurance records are available. This allows the consideration of loss-intensive storm events back to 1948, enlarging the event catalogue to cover the recent 60+ years, and to investigate the statistical characteristics of severe storm loss events in Germany based on a larger sample than provided by the insurance records only. Extreme value analysis is applied to the loss data to estimate the return periods of loss-intensive storms, yielding a return period for storm "Kyrill", for example, of approximately 15 to 21 years.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirien Whan ◽  
Kate Saunders

<p>Extreme wind gusts have severe socio-economic impacts, so any source of extra information on this variable is invaluable for mitigating associated damages and<br />protecting vulnerable communities. Unfortunately, networks of ocial measurement stations are limited in their ability to observe wind gusts. Official stations<br />are separated by vast distances, so extreme wind gusts often go unobserved due to the highly localised nature of these events. A wealth of additional observa-<br />tions is available from personal weather stations (PWSs) and could be used in combination with official observations to observe extreme gust events. However,<br />concerns about underlying data quality have to date prevented the usage of gust data from PWSs.</p> <p>Research for other meteorological variables has demonstrated that with appropriate quality control PWSs can contribute high-quality observations that complement ocial measurements. It is well known that PWSs can provide useful and reliable temperature and precipitation observations. For crowd-sourced wind variables, the situation is more dicult. Crowd-sourced wind observations have di erent sources of error that pose signi cant challenges to quality control. For example, instrumentation is non-standard which results in di erent sensor sensitivities, and non-standard station placements introduce severe spatial in-consistencies and result in censoring of low wind speeds. Chen et al. (2021) recently developed a  exible approach to quality control and bias adjustment (QC/BA) that addresses this for wind speeds. They incorporate QC steps for official stations and develop new QC/BA steps to address the novel challenges posed by crowd-sourced data. Chen et al. (2021) showed after QC/BA, the wind speed climatology of a network of PWSs matched well with the climatology of ocial stations, and the wind speed variability between PWSs was similar to that of official  tations. Additionally, subsequent analysis has shown that the quality controlled and bias adjusted data from PWSs is able to detect small scale extreme wind speeds  ssociated with thunderstorms, that were not observed at official stations. No attempt has yet been made to quality control crowd-sourced observations of wind gusts  espite how impractical it is to obtain widespread observations of wind gusts using standard techniques.</p> <p>In this project we will develop the necessary methods and software for the QC/BA of wind gusts. As part of this, we will develop inter-variable consistency checks between crowd-sourced wind speeds, wind gusts and wind directions. We will also produce an open-source, high-quality wind gust data set from PWSs that can be used to improve forecasts, warnings, and veri cation of extreme gusts.</p> <p><strong>References</strong></p> <p>Chen, J., Saunders, K. & Whan, K. (2021), `Quality control and bias correction of citizen science wind observations', <em>Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteo-</em><br /><em>rological Society (under review) </em>.</p>


Author(s):  
Djordje Romanic

Tornadoes and downbursts cause extreme wind speeds that often present a threat to human safety, structures, and the environment. While the accuracy of weather forecasts has increased manifold over the past several decades, the current numerical weather prediction models are still not capable of explicitly resolving tornadoes and small-scale downbursts in their operational applications. This chapter describes some of the physical (e.g., tornadogenesis and downburst formation), mathematical (e.g., chaos theory), and computational (e.g., grid resolution) challenges that meteorologists currently face in tornado and downburst forecasting.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3626
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
Yishui Shui

The vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) radio channel is non-stationary due to the rapid movement of vehicles. However, the stationarity of the V2V channels is an important indicator of the V2V channel characteristics. Therefore, we analyzed the non-stationarity of V2V radio channels using the local region of stationarity (LRS). We selected seven scenarios, including three directions of travel, i.e., in the same, vertical, and opposite directions, and different speeds and environments in a similar driving direction. The power delay profile (PDP) and LRS were estimated from the measured channel impulse responses. The results show that the most important influences on the stationary times are the direction and the speed of the vehicles. The average stationary times for driving in the same direction range from 0.3207 to 1.9419 s, the average stationary times for driving in the vertical direction are 0.0359–0.1348 s, and those for driving in the opposite direction are 0.0041–0.0103 s. These results are meaningful for the analysis of the statistical characteristics of the V2V channel, such as the delay spread and Doppler spread. Small-scale fading based on the stationary times affects the quality of signals transmitted in the V2V channel, including the information transmission rate and the information error code rate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Yui-Chuin Shiah ◽  
Chia Hsiang Chang ◽  
Yu-Jen Chen ◽  
Ankam Vinod Kumar Reddy

ABSTRACT Generally, the environmental wind speeds in urban areas are relatively low due to clustered buildings. At low wind speeds, an aerodynamic stall occurs near the blade roots of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), leading to decay of the power coefficient. The research targets to design canards with optimal parameters for a small-scale HAWT system operated at variable rotational speeds. The design was to enhance the performance by delaying the aerodynamic stall near blade roots of the HAWT to be operated at low wind speeds. For the optimal design of canards, flow fields of the sample blades with and without canards were both simulated and compared with the experimental data. With the verification of our simulations, Taguchi analyses were performed to seek the optimum parameters of canards. This study revealed that the peak performance of the optimized canard system operated at 540 rpm might be improved by ∼35%.


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (H16) ◽  
pp. 86-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Todd Hoeksema

AbstractThe almost stately evolution of the global heliospheric magnetic field pattern during most of the solar cycle belies the intense dynamic interplay of photospheric and coronal flux concentrations on scales both large and small. The statistical characteristics of emerging bipoles and active regions lead to development of systematic magnetic patterns. Diffusion and flows impel features to interact constructively and destructively, and on longer time scales they may help drive the creation of new flux. Peculiar properties of the components in each solar cycle determine the specific details and provide additional clues about their sources. The interactions of complex developing features with the existing global magnetic environment drive impulsive events on all scales. Predominantly new-polarity surges originating in active regions at low latitudes can reach the poles in a year or two. Coronal holes and polar caps composed of short-lived, small-scale magnetic elements can persist for months and years. Advanced models coupled with comprehensive measurements of the visible solar surface, as well as the interior, corona, and heliosphere promise to revolutionize our understanding of the hierarchy we call the solar magnetic field.


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (7) ◽  
pp. 1393-1412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale T. Andersen ◽  
Christopher P. McKay ◽  
Victor Lagun

AbstractIn November 2008 an automated meteorological station was established at Lake Untersee in East Antarctica, producing a 5-yr data record of meteorological conditions at the lake. This dataset includes five austral summer seasons composed of December, January, and February (DJF). The average solar flux at Lake Untersee for the four years with complete solar flux data is 99.2 ± 0.6 W m−2. The mean annual temperature at Lake Untersee was determined to be −10.6° ± 0.6°C. The annual degree-days above freezing for the five years were 9.7, 37.7, 22.4, 7.0, and 48.8, respectively, with summer (DJF) accounting for virtually all of this. For these five summers the average DJF temperatures were −3.5°, −1.9°, −2.2°, −2.6°, and −2.5°C. The maximum (minimum) temperatures were +5.3°, +7.6°, +5.7°, +4.4°, and +9.0°C (−13.8°, −12.8°, −12.9°, −13.5°, and −12.1°C). The average of the wind speed recorded was 5.4 m s−1, the maximum was 35.7 m s−1, and the average daily maximum was 15 m s−1. The wind speed was higher in the winter, averaging 6.4 m s−1. Summer winds averaged 4.7 m s−1. The dominant wind direction for strong winds is from the south for all seasons, with a secondary source of strong winds in the summer from the east-northeast. Relative humidity averages 37%; however, high values will occur with an average period of ~10 days, providing a strong indicator of the quasi-periodic passage of storms across the site. Low summer temperatures and high wind speeds create conditions at the surface of the lake ice resulting in sublimation rather than melting as the main mass-loss process.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 1290-1300
Author(s):  
Jieliang Shen ◽  
Yan Su ◽  
Qing Liang ◽  
Xinhua Zhu

An inertial navigation system (INS) aided with an aircraft dynamic model (ADM) is developed as a novel airborne integrated navigation system, coping with the absence of a global navigation satellite system. To overcome the shortcomings of the conventional linear integration of INS/ADM based on an extended Kalman filter, a nonlinear integration method is proposed. Fast-update ADM makes it possible to utilize a direct filtering method, which employs nonlinear INS mechanics as system equations and a nonlinear ADM as observation equations, substituting the indirect filtering based on linear error equations. The strong nonlinearity generally calls for an unscented Kalman filter to accomplish the fusion process. Dealing with the model uncertainty, the inaccurate statistical characteristics of the noise and the potential nonpositive definiteness of the covariance matrix, an improved square-root unscented H∞ filter (ISRUHF) is derived in the paper, in which the robust factor [Formula: see text] is further expanded into a diagonal matrix [Formula: see text], to improve the accuracy and robustness of the integrated navigation system. Corresponding simulations as well as real flight tests based on a small-scale fixed-wing aircraft are operated and ISRUHF shows superiority compared with the commonly used fusion algorithm.


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