Periods of constant wind speed: how long do they last in the turbulent atmospheric boundary layer?

Abstract. We perform a statistical analysis of the occurrence of periods of constant wind speed in atmospheric turbulence. We hypothesize that such periods of constant wind speed are related to characteristic wind field structures that, when interacting with a wind turbine, may induce particular dynamical responses. Therefore, this study focuses on characterizing the constant wind speed periods in terms of their lengths and probability of occurrence. Atmospheric offshore wind data are analyzed. Our findings reveal that long constant wind speed periods are an intrinsic feature of the marine atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). We confirm that the probability distribution of such periods of constant wind speeds follows a Pareto-like distribution, admitting power law behavior for periods exceeding the large-eddy-turnover time. The power law characteristics depend on the local conditions and the precise definition of wind speed thresholds. A comparison to wind time series generated with standard synthetic wind models and to time series from ideal stationary turbulence suggests that these structures are not characteristics of small-scale turbulence but seem to be consequences of larger-scale structures of the atmospheric boundary layer and thus are multi-scale. Given the results, we show that the continuous-time random walk (CTRW) model, as a non-standard wind model, can be adapted to generate time series of the wind speed whose statistics match the statistics of observed periods of constant wind speed.