Near-Surface Wind Speed

Daily near-surface wind speeds (u) grids have been developed over all of Australia at a 0.01° spatial resolution by interpolating terrestrial anemometers measurements from an expanded network for 1975–2006. For these new grids, the Australian-averaged u trend for 1975–2006 was -0.009 m s-1 a-1 (agreeing with earlier site-based studies) with stilling over 88% of the land-surface. This new dataset can be used in numerous environmental applications, including benchmarking general circulation models to improve the representation of key parameters that govern u estimation. The methodology implemented here can be applied globally.\n\nDataset Creation Date: 2008-07-15\n\nDatasets updated on Jan 2019 to include year 2018\n\nLineage: The original point data were supplied by Bureau of Meteorology, specifically the Australian Daily Wind Data Product IDCJC06.200706 was used. Daily wind-run (km/day) from low-set anemometers (< 3 m) were converted to daily average wind-speed (m/s) using the method reported in McVicar et al. (2008). These data were then spatially interpolated using ANUSPLIN Version 4.3 (Hutchinson 2004). A tri-variate thin plate spline (TVTPS) as a function of longitude, latitude and distance inland from coast (Hutchinson et al., 1984) was the primary model to interpolate the data. A transformation of distance from the coast (d) in km was applied to capture the impact of seabreezes and land-breezes on wind speed. The TVTPS model was successfully used to fit over 95% of the days. However, for a less than 5% of days there were issues successfully fitting this primary model. Most of these days were fit by applying a square-root transformation to the input dependent data (i.e., the daily average wind speed) prior to fitting the spline. Refer to the Readme file for more details \n\nCredit:\nThis dataset was developed by the Time Series Remote Sensing Team, CSIRO Land and Water in conjunction with other researchers outlined in the paper documenting this research : McVicar, T.R., Van Niel, T.G., Li, L.T., Roderick, M.L., Rayner, D.P., Ricciardulli, L. and Donohue, R.J. (2008) Wind speed climatology and trends for Australia, 1975-2006: Capturing the stilling phenomenon and comparison with near-surface reanalysis output. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L20403, doi:10.1029/2008GL035627. This work was supported by the affiliations listed on the same paper.\n