Improving the Amplitude and Frequency of Wind Gusts in Live Weather

This is really great data! Thank you for collecting it and sharing the results. I would make a couple of observations based on this better quality information:

  1. The sim is not correctly interpreting METAR winds. If winds are reported as 19017G28KT, the plots show that the sim is creating a varying wind between a minimum of 17 knots and a maximum of 28 knots. That is incorrect. 17 knots is the average wind speed (over a 2 minute interval in the US METAR standard), and 28 knots is the maximum wind gust (recorded over a 10 minute interval in the US). In order for 17 knots to be the average, there would need to be lulls where the wind speed drops below 17 knots.

  2. Gusts to near the maximum reported value seem excessively frequent. Over the course of three minutes, the charts show several gusts to at least 27 knots (within 1 knot of the 10 minute maximum).

I spent a little while searching for high-resolution real-world wind data to compare, and I found a couple of interesting academic papers. The following plot shows an example of wind speed measured over a 10-minute interval with the peak gust highlighted:

This comes from a 2022 paper in Applied Sciences entitled “Characterization of Wind Gusts: A Study Based on Meteorological Tower Observations” by Yan, Chan, et al. In this case, the 10-minute maximum gust was a clear outlier, with other gusts of widely varying magnitudes throughout the 10 minute period.

The same paper also includes the following histograms showing the relative frequency of a variety of wind speed parameters (including gusts and gust amplitudes) in observed data. The histograms show that gusts tend to follow a distribution with small gusts more common and large gusts less common:

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