Selected Upper-Air Wind Speed Distributions

Abstract

Some weapon systems are sensitive to winds in the lower part of the atmosphere. Wind speed distributions and random wind speeds derived from the distributions are often required to help determine the operational capabilities of these systems. A literature survey revealed that investigators usually used either a log-normal or a Weibull distribution as the model for the distribution of wind speeds independent of direction. In addition to these two distributions, a gamma distribution is also evaluated in this report. Wind speeds observed in three different geographical regions at 10 altitudes up to 5 km 3 diurnal time periods, and 5 seasonal time periods were evaluated. This report contains the results of the wind speed analysis for some of the combinations of altitude, diurnal time periods, and seasonal time periods for each of the three geographical regions--European Lowlands, European Highlands, and Mideast Desert. The observed wind speed distributions were adequately represented by the analytical istributions. Weibull, Gamma, Log-normal, Upper air, Wind speed

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1992
Accession Number
ADA264822

Entities

People

  • Elton P. Avara

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Altitude
  • Artillery
  • Atmospheric Sciences
  • Climatology
  • Databases
  • Environment
  • Method Of Moments
  • Military Research
  • Normal Distribution
  • Plastic Explosives
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Security
  • Space Sciences
  • Space Systems
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Fluid Dynamics.
  • Space/Atmospheric Physics.
  • Statistical inference.