STATISTICAL STRUCTURE OF WIND SPEED IN DETERMINATION OF OCEAN—ATMOSPHERE ENERGY AND GAS EXCHANGE

R. S. Bortkovskii and B. N. Egorov

Based on hourly measurements from five automatic buoys of the NDBC system (USA), conducted for 10—15 years, the distribution functions of the wind velocity modulus are constructed for all months, seasons, and year as a whole using averaging for all years of measurement. It is shown that these empirical functions agree well with normal distribution. It is found that the errors in the mean climatic gas, heat, moisture, and momentum fluxes that are caused by the error in parametrization of the empirical probability density by the normal distribution are negligible. A statistical relation between standard deviation and the mean value in the climatic series of wind velocity is studied. The error of flux calculation in estimating standard deviation by the mean wind velocity is shown to be also negligible.