A summary of wind climate continuity with ASOS

This continuing project was first reported on in October 1994, over five years ago. There have been eleven papers written by the author on this subject and how the changes effect different applications. Five papers were progress reports presented at both the National Weather Association and the AMS annual IIPS conference. The seventh paper was the first to formally alert another technical community, wind engineering through ASME, of the consequences of the change to ASOS on the peak wind speed measurement. The tenth paper was a report to the American Association of State Climatologists in 1998, during which meeting AASC adopted the standard 3-second running average as the definition of peak wind speed. The eleventh paper reported the findings to the wind energy community through AWEA, the American Wind Energy Association. The last two papers addressed the international weather services converting to automatic weather stations in Vienna, Austria and the international wind energy measurement community in Madrid, Spain.

The major findings are reviewed. ASOS reports a smaller peak wind speed than the F420 and gust recorder. This difference will be decreased when the standard 3-second running average is implemented. ASOS, as a digital data gathering instrument, provides an improvement in the sense that it is objective. Calibrations for the wind measurement are excellent. The question of representativeness is important even if the instrument reports exactly what it senses. A different site may show a different "climate."