Hello everyone, 
I have a question related to wind speed assessment.
Currently we are monitoring wind resources at a site and it has been going on for about 6 months. However the past 6 months have been very calm so the measured average wind speed is quite low. This wind speed doesn’t represent the site very well as the monitoring period is relatively short. In order to obtain a more acturate wind speed for our cost model, we decided to purchase some long term data (approximately 10 years) from weather stations close to our monitoring site.
My question is that once we get the long term reference data, what is the common practice to get an accurate estimated wind speed at our monitoring site?
I hope I posted the question at the right place. ^.^
The most important step is to determine whether data taken at the reference measurement site is correlated to your monitoring site. This can be done using statistical methods such as regression equations.
If a statistical relationship can be established between the reference site and your monitoring site during the period when both your site and the reference site were in operation, then you can estimate an average wind speed at your site. This would be done by taking the long-term average data at the reference site and using statistics to estimate at your monitoring site. I am not an expert in which statistical methods are the best to use.
The trickiest part is to determine whether a candidate long-term reference station has a “clean” period of measurement data. In other words, changes in the anemometer location, height, and instrument type will affect the periods that can be reliably used for a long-term average at the reference site. Information about the anemometer is often difficult to obtain.
Estimating an accurate wind speed at a monitoring site from a long-term reference site can be one of the harder problems faced in resource assessment. I hope you have success in your efforts.
Marc Schwartz
Thanks Marc.
Later I found the software package WindFarm by ReSoft Ltd has a function does what I was after. However, WindFarm doesn’t give enough information to what it does to the data, sometimes the results are different from results calculated through other methods/softwares and there are no indications to why that happens.
Are there any other software packages available do data correlation and estimation of the long term average wind speed?
Thanks.