Abstract
Southwest Slovenia is a region well-known for frequent episodes of strong and gusty Bora wind, which may damage structures, affect traffic, and poses threats to human safety in general. With the increased availability of computational power, the interest in high resolution modeling of Bora on local scales is growing. To model it adequately, the flow characteristics of Bora should be experimentally investigated and parameterized. This study presents the analysis of wind speed vertical profiles at Razdrto, Slovenia, a location strongly exposed to Bora during six Bora episodes of different duration, appearing between April 2010 and May 2011. The empirical power law and the logarithmic law for Bora wind, commonly used for the description of neutrally stratified atmosphere, were evaluated for 10-min averaged wind speed data measured at four different heights. Power law and logarithmic law wind speed profiles, which are commonly used in high resolution computational models, were found to approximate well the measured data. The obtained power law coefficient and logarithmic law parameters, which are for modeling purposes commonly taken to be constant for a specific site, were found to vary significantly between different Bora episodes, most notably due to different wind direction over complex terrain. To increase modeling precision, the effects of local topography on wind profile parameters needs to be experimentally assessed and implemented.
Highlights
Bora is strong and gusty downslope wind with variable gust frequency, observed on the lee side of Dinaric Alps along the Adriatic coast [1]
The main aim of this study was to evaluate the applicability of wind profile laws, which are commonly used in computational wind engineering (CWE) models, to Bora wind and to determine power law coefficient and logarithmic law parameters for a specific site in Slovenia using in situ wind data
An analysis of the Bora mean wind speed profile was given for specific region in Southwest Slovenia, which is strongly affected by Bora
Summary
Bora is strong and gusty downslope wind with variable gust frequency, observed on the lee side of Dinaric Alps along the Adriatic coast [1]. Bora is common in Southwest Slovenia over the ridges of Trnovski gozd, Nanos, and the Javorniki Plateau, spreading into the Vipava valley and over the Karst towards the Bay of Trieste [5,6]. It generally appears in the presence of a low pressure center over the Adriatic or a high pressure cell over Central Europe or as combination of both [3,7,8]. The dynamics of Bora has been investigated in a number of observational, theoretical, and modeling studies over the past decades. Studies arising from the Alpine Experiment (ALPEX) project in 1981 provided more details on its basic properites at a number of sites [13,14], based on which a more appropriate description of dynamically generated wind (hydraulic and wave breaking theory) was developed [13,15,16]
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