This project was conducted for the Alaska Department of Transportation's
Airport Design group to gather basic design data for Teller, Alaska. The
study period was 2 years beginning 21 May 2002.
The study tower at Teller had two RM Young wind sensors, identified as windset
1 and 2, both mounted at 10 meter height. A Campbell Scientific CR10X datalogger
was used to collect and store data, which was then transmitted through a Campbell
RF400 radio set to an Internet-connected base station at the Teller school. In
addition to wind, data was also collected for temperature and humidity at the site.
Data for this two-year study are presented in several forms, textual
and graphical, for each month of the year and cumulative. Note that
the monthly data includes event counts from both years of the study,
not just one.
- textual windrose bins, event counts
Each bin represents the number of times the wind blew in a specific direction
within a specific speed range. The speed bins are in mph with the following
lower limits:
8.5, 12.5, 15.5, 18.5, 24.5, 31.5, 38.5, 45.5 MPH
Values less than 8.5 mph are counted as ``calm''.
The data are processed into 16 direction bins, each centered on the compass
direction, so that, e.g., the ``N'' bin includes events with direction between
11.25 degrees W of north and 11.25 degrees E of north.
textual windrose bins, percent frequency
Bin events are normalized to 100 total events
textual windrose bins, comma-separated percentages
Data is presented for use by a windrose analysis program, with bin
values separated by commas, and presented as percent frequency to 3
decimal places.
textual windrose bins, formatted for DOT processing program
The data from the above (3 decimal place percents) file was filtered to
a format suitable for use with DOT's processing program.
textual windrose bins, formatted for FAA processing program
The FAA windrose analysis program used by DOT uses 36 direction bins, the
first ranging from 0 to 10 degrees, and 9 speed bins with the following
values in knots:
0, 4, 7, 11, 17, 22, 28, 34, 41 Knots
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 experimental 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.
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 dotfmt.txt, linking to file
SCOPE-dotfmt.txt) may also be viewed below.
(*) Zip archive files are compressed collections of files. Free software
to extract files from zip archives is available from
Info-ZIP.
- datalogger battery voltage during the study
For each day and hour of the year, the number of available data records
is indicated.
- record counts, all available data:
In this section we plot an increasing value when contiguous records are
available, and either leave the value as-is or reset it to 0 when records
are missing. The purpose is to try to highlight the availability or lack
of data.
- record continuity, all available data:
- record continuity, reset to zero on discontinuity
The following shell, Perl, and Python scripts were used to process the
data. These are included for information only.
This project was carried out by the
Water & Environmental Research Center
Institute of Northern Engineering
University of Alaska Fairbanks.
If you have any questions or comments about this project, contact:
