• Grayling Wind Study
• Introduction
• Description of results
• Windrose Results
• Contacts

Grayling Wind Study

Introduction

This project was conducted under contract with PDC, Inc., to gather basic wind data at Grayling, Alaska for the Alaska Department of Transportation's Airport Design group. The study period was November 1999 through November 2001, but data is disontinuous due to several problems.

Wind instrument towers were erected at two sites at Grayling; the lower site near the existing airport, and the upper site on higher ground. Each tower had two RM Young wind sensors, identified as set1 and set2, all mounted at a height of 10 meters.

The following timeline depicts the periods of data gathered for each site, with ``u'' and ``l'' representing the upper and lower sites, respectively:

    1999                    2000                    2001
    j f m a m j j a s o n d j f m a m j j a s o n d j f m a m j j a s o n d
                         uuuuuuu uuuuu uuuuuuuuu            uuuuuu u
                              llllllllllllllllll   llllllllllllllllllll
  

Description of results

Data for this one-year study are presented in several forms, textual and graphical, for each month of the year and cumulative.

• counts, textual windrose bins, event counts
  Each bin represents the number of times the wind blew in a specific direction within a specific speed range

• percent, textual windrose bins, percent frequency
  Bin events are normalized to 100 total events

• pct3, textual windrose bins, percent values to 3 decimal places
  Data is presented for use by a windrose analysis program, with bin values in percent frequency to 3 decimal places.

• graphical windrose
  Polar plot of windrose sectors, with colors representing specific windspeed ranges, and graduated in frequency of events (i.e., normalized to 1 event total).

  Note: The windrose plot software used is experimental and not yet proven to be correct or accurate.

• distribution plot of windspeed vs direction
  This plot is presented for comparison with the windrose data and plots. It should provide a direct view of the data distribution, and might be useful or not.

In addition to the wind data results, a few other diagnostic plots are provided to help assess the reliability of the data.

Windrose Results

Results are presented in separate pages of plots to allow comparison between windsets 1 and 2 at each tower, and between the two sites:

• lower site
• upper site
• lower and upper sites

Processed bin files are zipped (*) for each windset of each site. These windrose bin files are intended for processing using DOT's analysis programs. Individual files (identified as pct3, linking to file SCOPE-pct3.txt) may also be viewed from the above pages.

• lower site, set 1
• lower site, set 2
• upper site, set 1
• upper site, set 2

Contacts

If you have any questions or comments about this project, contact:

• Douglas L. Kane <ffdlk@uaf.edu>, 907-474-7808

• Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu>, 907-474-6152