Paper detail

Superstatistical wind fields from point-wise atmospheric turbulence measurements

Accurate models of turbulent wind fields have become increasingly important in the atmospheric sciences, e.g., for the determination of spatiotemporal correlations in wind parks, the estimation of individual loads on turbine rotor and blades, or for the modeling of particle-turbulence interaction in atmospheric clouds or pollutant distributions in urban settings. Due to the prohibitive task of resolving the fields across a broad range of scales, one oftentimes has to resort to stochastic wind field models that fulfill specific, empirically observed, properties. Here, we present a new model for the generation of synthetic wind fields that can be apprehended as an extension of the well-known Mann model for inflow turbulence in the wind energy sciences. Whereas such Gaussian random field models solely control second-order statistics (i.e., velocity correlation tensors or kinetic energy spectra), we explicitly show that our extended model emulates the effects of higher-order statistics as well. Most importantly, the empirically observed phenomenon of small-scale intermittency, which can be regarded as one of the key features of atmospheric turbulent flows, is reproduced with high accuracy and at considerably low computational cost. Our method is based on a recently developed multipoint statistical description of turbulent velocity fields [J. Friedrich et al., J. Phys. Complex. 2 045006 (2021)] and consists of a superposition of multivariate Gaussian statistics with fluctuating covariances. We demonstrate exemplarily how such "superstatistical" wind fields can be constrained on a certain number of point-wise measurement data from a meteorological mast array.