Standard deviation of wind direction

[footloosiety]

Which method do your loggers use to calculate this?

[David Carlson]

Hello David,

Thank you for your question.  I'll elaborate a little bit here to give background for future readers.

Standard deviation is generally calculated as the square root of the variance, where variance is the square of the difference between each sample and the mean of the samples.  Alternately, standard deviation can be approximated using devised methods.  Approximating methods take less computational power and are regarded as sufficently accurate for wind data.

Our loggers use the Yamartino method to approximate standard deviation for wind direction.

There is a detailed breakdown of the Yamartino method here at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamartino_method

 

[footloosiety]

great, thanks.