Small and large scale fluctuations in atmospheric wind speeds

Atmospheric wind speeds and their fluctuations at different locations (onshore and offshore) are examined. One of the most striking features is the marked intermittency of probability density functions (PDF) of velocity differences, no matter what location is considered. The shape of these PDFs is found to be robust over a wide range of scales which seems to contradict the mathematical concept of stability where a Gaussian distribution should be the limiting one. Motivated by the non-stationarity of atmospheric winds it is shown that the intermittent distributions can be understood as a superposition of different subsets of isotropic turbulence. Thus we suggest a simple stochastic model to reproduce the measured statistics of wind speed fluctuations.