Intense and Extreme Wind Speeds Observed by Anemometer and Seismic Networks: An Eastern U.S. Case Study

Abstract

AbstractThe scale and intensity of extreme wind events have tremendous relevance to determining the impact on infrastructure and natural and managed ecosystems. Analyses presented herein show the following. 1) Wind speeds in excess of the station-specific 95th percentile are coherent over distances of up to 1000 km over the eastern United States, which implies that the drivers of high wind speeds are manifest at the synoptic scale. 2) Although cold fronts associated with extratropical cyclones are a major cause of high–wind speed events, maximum sustained and gust wind speeds are only weakly dependent on the near-surface horizontal temperature gradient across the front. 3) Gust factors (GF) over the eastern United States have a mean value of 1.57 and conform to a lognormal probability distribution, and the relationship between maximum observed GF and sustained wind speed conforms to a power law with coefficients of 5.91 and −0.499. Even though there is coherence in the occurrence of intense wind speeds at the synoptic scale, the intensity and spatial extent of extreme wind events are not fully characterized even by the dense meteorological networks deployed by the National Weather Service. Seismic data from the USArray, a program within the Earthscope initiative, may be suitable for use in mapping high-wind and gust events, however. It is shown that the seismic channels exhibit well-defined spectral signatures under conditions of high wind, with a variance peak at frequencies of ~0.04 s−1 and an amplitude that appears to scale with the magnitude of observed wind gusts.