Long-term Correlations and Extreme Wind Speed Estimations

In this paper, we use fluctuation analysis to study statistical correlations in wind speed time series. Each time series used here was recorded hourly over 40 years. The fluctuation functions of wind speed time series were found to scale with a universal exponent approximating to 0.7, which means that the wind speed time series are long-term correlated. In the classical method of extreme estimations, data are commonly assumed to be independent (without correlations). This assumption will lead to an overestimation if data are long-term correlated. We thus propose a simple method to improve extreme wind speed estimations based on correlation analysis. In our method, extreme wind speeds are obtained by simply scaling the mean return period in the classical method. The scaling ratio is an analytic function of the scaling exponent in the fluctuation analysis.