Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
Due to the availability of multi-megawatt wind turbines,
ease of installation and maintenance, economic compatibility
and commercial acceptance, the power of the wind is being
used globally for both grid-connected and off-grid applications.
The power of the wind is intermittently available due to the
fluctuating nature of the wind and hence needs to be understood
well. Therefore, its variability in time and spatial domains was
studied. The present work utilized daily mean values of wind
speed from different meteorological stations spread over the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in conjunction with wavelet
transform and fast Fourier transform power spectrum
techniques to understand the dynamic nature of the wind at nine
stations. The study found that wind speed changed by ±0.6 to
±1.6 knots over a long period of about 10 years depending on
the locations. The long-term mean wind speed of 5.6, 8.9, 6.25,
8.1, 6.0, 7.1, 6.0, 8.6 and 7.3 knots were obtained at Abha,
Dhahran, Gizan, Guryat, Hail, Jeddah, Riyadh, Turaif and
Yanbo, respectively. The annual fluctuation in wind speed is
larger (±1.3 to ±3.0 knots) and more regular at Abha, Dhahran,
Guryat and Yanbo, while smaller (±0.7 to ±1.1 knots) and less
regular at Gizan, Hail, Jeddah, Riyad and Turaif, with the
greatest (±3.0) and smallest (±0.7) at Guryat and Gizan,
respectively.
