Extreme convective gusts in the contiguous USA. Meteorology, 3 (2024), 281-309.

Most damage to buildings across the contiguous United States of America (CONUS) is caused by gusts in convective events associated with thunderstorms. Design rules for structures to resist these events rely on the integrity of meteorological observations and the methods of assessment. These issues were addressed in six preliminary studies published in 2022 and 2023, allowing this present study to focus on analysis and reporting of gust events observed between 2000 and 2023 by the US Automated Surface Observation System (ASOS) at 642 well-exposed ASOS stations dis-tributed across the contiguous USA. It has been recently recognized that the response of buildings to convective gusts, which are non-stationary transient events, differs in character from the response to the locally stationary atmospheric boundary gusts, requiring gust events to be classified and assessed by type. This study sorts the mixture of all observed gust events exceeding 20kn, but excluding contributions from hurricanes and tropical storms, into five classes of valid meteorological types and two classes of invalid artefacts. The valid classes are individually fitted to optimal sub-asymptotic models by extreme value analysis. Classes are recombined into a joint mixture model and compared with current design rules.