Extreme wind studies in Singapore. An area with mixed weather system

Abstract

This paper presents an extreme wind studies in Singapore, which is an area with mixed weather systems. The extreme winds in Singapore are generated by both monsoon and thunderstorms (or squalls). Thus, the design wind speed is expected to be influenced by these weather systems. Two methods, i.e. Gumbel's and Independent Storm methods, were used in this study. However, the co-existence of the weather systems suggested that the estimation of the design wind speed might not be done in a straightforward manner. Extreme wind data need to be sorted according to the different wind producing weather system before any analyses could be carried out. In this study, the wind extreme data were separated into two weather systems, namely the large- and small-scale systems. Although the area of Singapore is about 40 km×20 km, the result suggests that the wind characteristics at Tengah (west side of Singapore) were different from Seletar (central) and Changi (east of Singapore).