Historical and future wind events for Alaskan communities, Alaska, 1980-2099

• Main Authors: Redilla, Kyle, Walsh, John
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2021
• Subjects: Alaska; arctic; wind; wind event; climatology; WRF; Arctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a2qb9v66g; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A2QB9V66G

Warning to data users - In versions before doi:10.18739/A2QB9V66G, errors have been discovered in the following variables of this dataset: mean_direction. If you have previously downloaded this dataset which included those variables please download the new version of the dataset. Hourly wind data from 67 Alaska communities with observing stations, one atmospheric reanalysis, and two global climate models were processed to identify wind events exceeding location-specific thresholds. The ERA (ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) Re-Analysis)-Interim reanalysis and output from the GFDL-CM3 (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory) and NCAR-CCSMM4 (National Center for Atmospheric Research) global climate models were downscaled to Alaska and the surrounding regions using the Weather Research and Forecasting model. Hourly wind speed measurements collected during 1980-2015 at 67 Alaskan communities via ASOS/AWOS (Automated Surface Observing System/Automated Weather Observing System) stations were used to bias-correct the WRF-downscaled (Weather Research and Forecasting) ERA-Interim hourly wind speed output. These were subsequently used to bias-correct the historical (1979-2005) and future (2006-2100) WRF-downscaled CM3/CCSM4 wind speeds. These wind speeds were then processed to identify wind events meeting a set of speed and duration thresholds. A wind event was defined as the wind speed being greater than the wind speed threshold, for some duration in hours. Five wind speed thresholds were used for each community. The thresholds were community-specific, and were calculated as the 50th, 75th, 85th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of the ERA-Interim wind speed distributions for the particular community. The five duration thresholds used were 1, 6, 12, 24, and 48 hours. This dataset contains all wind events identified for each of the 67 communities, with each row of the data file consisting of a single wind event. This data drives some of the visualizations in the webtool found here.