"Winds aloft are normally determined from the horizontal projection of an ascending balloon's path on a polar diagram. This method obtains a value for the average wind speed and direction for the layer through which the balloon has ascended during a two-minute interval by drawing a straight line between the horizontal projection of the balloon's position at the beginning and end of the two-minute interval. The horizontal projection of a balloon's actual path is a smooth curve and it is believed that a more accurate measurement of the average wind speed and direction for the layer will be obtained by determining the wind speed from the length of the curve for the two-minute interval and determining the direction from the tangent to the balloon's position along the curve at the intermediate time interval. The wind speed was computed by both methods for three months' data and the results compared with the purpose of determining a correction factor. The wind direction as determined by the method suggested was found not to vary appreciably from the direction determined by the conventional method. It was found that there is often a considerable difference in the wind speed as determined by the two methods especially at very low wind speeds, with the wind speed determined by the conventional method always being too small, but that it is impractical to apply a correction factor to reported winds when one considers the absolute value, rather than the percentual value, of the difference"--Abstract. / Typescript. / "August, 1956." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 16).

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Statistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

In this study we conduct wind resource assessment to evaluate the annual energy production of a wind turbine. To estimate energy production of a wind turbine over a period of time, the power characteristics of the wind turbine are integrated with the probabilities of the wind speed expected at a chosen site. The first data set was obtained from a wind farm in Denmark. We propose several probability density functions to model the distribution of the wind speed. We use techniques from nonlinear regression analysis to model the power curve of a wind turbine. The best fit distribution model is assessed by performing numeric goodness–of–fit measures and graphical analyses. Johnson’s bounded (SB) distribution provides the best fit model with the smallest Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K-S) test statistic . 15. The four parameter logistic nonlinear regression (4PL) model is determined to provide the best fit to the power curve data, according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The estimated annual energy yield is compared to the actual production of the wind turbine. Our models underestimate the actual energy production by a 1 difference. In Chapter Six we conduct data processing, analyses and comparison of wind speed distributions using a data set obtained from a measuring wind mast mounted in Humansdorp, Eastern Cape. The expected annual energy production is estimated by using the certified power curve as provided by the manufacturer of the wind turbine under study. The commonly used Weibull distribution is determined to provide the best fit distribution model to our selected models. The annual energy yield is estimated at 7.33 GWh, with a capacity factor of 41.8 percent.

This thesis represents the first large-scale, systematic study to use the double trace moment (DTM) technique in order to characterize the universal multifractal nature of aircraft-based measurements of wind velocity and several passive scalar concentrations under a variety of ambient conditions. Power-law scaling behaviour was demonstrated for the examined fields, from the smallest accessible measurement scales up to at least 250 km, right through the "mesoscale gap" postulated by the standard model of atmospheric dynamics. DTM results indicate remarkable stability in the estimates of the multifractality index, $ alpha$, and the codimension of mean singularity, $C sb1$, for wind velocity measured under different conditions of surface type, time of year, and measurement height within the surface boundary layer. Estimates for $ rm CO sb2, H sb2O, and O sb3$ were largely dominated by the wind velocity statistics as expected, but slightly sensitive to measurement height and moderately sensitive to significant changes in the underlying surface. Results showed that all of the fields examined may be classified as "unconditionally hard" multifractals, which is consistent with previously-published results for ground-based wind velocity measurements. It was demonstrated using probability distribution and multifractal analyses that ensemble statistical moments above approximately second-order can be expected to diverge for all examined fields due to the extremely singular nature of the fields at sub-resolution scales, and that the currently-employed quasi-local aircraft based sampling strategy is capable of reliably characterizing the statistical behaviour of the examined fields up to this physically-imposed limit. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

No description available.

Wong Ho Man, William. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2002-2003, design report." / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.P.02 / Chapter 2 --- Project Vision --- p.P.03 / Chapter 3 --- Project Objectives --- p.P.04 / Chapter 4 --- Research Plan and Methodology --- p.P.05 / Chapter 5 --- Developed Wind Phenomenons --- p.P.07 / Chapter 6 --- Investigation Process and Findings --- p.P.17 / Chapter 7 --- Design Development --- p.P.24 / Chapter 8 --- Final Design --- p.P.33 / Chapter 9 --- Conclusion --- p.P.41

Variable electrical generation (VG) sources such as wind farms are an increasing percentage of total electrical generation in the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) balancing area and are starting to impact the ability of the regional balancing authority to control the electric grid. Wind farms are not dispatchable and challenge historical electric grid control methods. Successful integration of VG at high penetration levels of wind needs to address increased overall system variability and the rapid power ramp rates caused by wind. One of the new control paradigms needed is accurate wind speed prediction which directly relates to wind farm power output. With an accurate wind speed forecast other generation sources can be dispatched as needed to ensure grid stability. This work uses BPA metrology station (MS) data to make predictions for short-term wind speed where short-term is defined as a one hour prediction horizon. It is shown that, using the available metrology station data and several different prediction methodologies, only small improvements in short-term wind speed prediction can be achieved with the available data for the algorithms analyzed. / Graduation date: 2013

High frequency turbulent temperature measurements were performed above clipped grass in the lower atmospheric surface layer in conjunction with three-dimensional turbulent velocities. Measurements were also made of turbulent temperature inside a corn canopy and at the canopy top. The 500Hz temperature time series were collected over periods of varying intervals, to a maximum of 24 hours. / The multifractal analysis was performed on several datasets. First scaling properties of the temperature and the velocity fields were examined. Our results suggest that scaling is not observed throughout the entire range but on different regimes. The physically related regimes corresponding to the clipped grass experiment include the inertial subrange, the trend for diurnal peak, and a range between them, all together featuring the existence of the hourly gap. In the canopy experiment, except for the above feature, the effects of the presence of plant objects are also reflected by the presence of two regimes different from those for clipped grass field. / The double trace moment technique was performed on the inertial subrange of the temperature and velocity fields measured over clipped grass to obtain the parameters characterizing the multifractal fields. The variability of the parameters with the atmospheric stability was investigated and no apparent difference between stable and unstable conditions was found. The results reveal that those fields are universal multifractals with the characteristic parameters $ alpha$ near 1.7 and C$ sb1$ ranging from 0.04 to 0.12, implying that the fields can be modeled by a log-Levy process with unbounded singularities. We also found that the critical moment q$ rm sb{s}$ for the multifractal phase transition is close to 4.

Cloud-wind interactions play an important role in long-lived multiphase flows in various galaxy-related contexts (e.g., galactic fountains and winds, cosmological cold-mode accretion, or multiphase tails of satellites). These interactions occur when a volume-filling hot phase, the wind, moves relative to a cool pressure-confined body of gas, the cloud. The conditions necessary for clouds to survive the destructive effects of mixing and become entrained within the wind (i.e. for the relative velocity to be removed), has been a long-standing problem. This problem has received particular attention in the context of galactic winds: cloud entrainment is expected to play a critical role in explaining observed multiphase structure in these outflows. This thesis investigates a mechanism for facilitating cloud survival in the context of rapid cooling, which we hereafter term TRML (turbulent radiative mixing layer) entrainment. Our investigation leverages numerical (magneto)hydrodynamic ENZO-E simulations of a cool (≲10⁴𝐊) clouds that encounter a hot (≳10⁶𝐊), supersonic winds. We begin by introducing a simple entropy-based formalism to characterize the role of mixing in cloud-wind interactions, and demonstrate example applications using simulations. Under this formalism, the high-dimensional description of the interaction's state at a given time is simplified to the joint distribution of mass over pressure (𝑃 ) and entropy (𝐾=𝑃𝞀^-𝜸). As a result, this approach provides a way for (empirically and analytically) quantifying the impact of different initial conditions and sets of physics on the interaction's evolution. We find that mixing predominantly alters the distribution along the 𝐾 direction and illustrate how the formalism can be used to model mixing and cooling for fluid elements originating in the cloud. We further confirm and generalize a previously suggested survival criterion for clouds undergoing TRML entrainment, and demonstrate that the shape of the cooling curve, particularly at the low temperature end, can play an important role in controlling condensation. Moreover, we discuss the capacity of our approach to generalize such a criterion to apply to additional sets of physics, and to build intuition for the impact of subtle higher order effects not directly addressed by the criterion. Despite the fact that the competition the between turbulent mixing and radiative cooling dictate the outcome of the cloud-wind interaction (as well as many observable properties), turbulence in these interactions remains poorly understood. Thus, we next investigate the turbulence that arises for clouds undergoing TRML entrainment. To obtain robust results, we employ multiple metrics to characterize the turbulent velocity, 𝝂_turb. We find four primary results. First, 𝝂_turb manifests clear temperature dependence. Initially, 𝝂_turb roughly matches the scaling of sound speed on temperature. In gas hotter than the temperature where cooling peaks, this dependence weakens with time until 𝝂_turb is constant. Second, the relative velocity between the cloud and wind initially drives rapid growth of 𝝂_turb. As it drops (from entrainment), 𝝂_turb starts to decay before it stabilizes at roughly half its maximum. At late times cooling flows appear to support turbulence. Third, the magnitude of 𝝂_turb scales with the ratio between the hot phase sound crossing time and the minimum cooling time. Finally, we find tentative evidence for a length-scale associated with resolving turbulence. Under-resolving this scale may cause violent shattering and affect the cloud's large-scale morphological properties. Finally, we propose a new criterion for clouds to survive interactions with the wind in the via TRML entrainment, and validate it with simulations. Properties of TRML entrainment are generally understood to be controlled by ratio between the relevant dynamical and cooling timescales 𝝉_dyn / 𝝉_cool. Previously proposed survival criteria disagree about the size of the smallest surviving cloud by factors of up to ∼100. These criteria primarily differ in their choice of 𝝉_{\rm cool}$; perplexingly, the choices most consistent with the well-modeled micro-scale physics observed in shear-layer studies are associated with less-accurate criteria. We present a new criterion which agrees with previous fitting formulae but is based on a set of simple physical principles. Whereas prior criteria link 𝝉_dyn with the cloud destruction timescale, our new criterion links it to the characteristic cloud-crossing timescale of a hot-phase fluid element. This choice leads to scaling relations that are more physically consistent with shear-layer studies. Additionally, we illustrate that discrepancies among previous criteria primarily emerged due to the choices of simulation conditions, rather than commonly-cited differences in the definition of cloud destruction.

No description available.