New Zealand design wind speeds, directional and lee-zone multipliers proposed for AS/NZS 1170.2:2021

The study aims to estimate design wind speeds and associated directional multipliers, also lee-zone multipliers for New Zealand through the analysis of historical wind data recorded at meteorological stations and also utilising a high-resolution convection-resolving numerical weather prediction model (New Zealand Convective-Scale Model (NZCSM)) analyses. New Zealand’s historical wind data have not been analysed in the past two decades for design wind-load purposes. In addition, no attempt has been made to thoroughly homogenise the mean and gust wind speed data recorded prior to the 1990s and to convert them to equivalent Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) records. Furthermore, lee zones, areas affected by the wind speed-up due to the presence of mountains, can significantly influence the design wind loads, thus, it is crucial to estimate the spatial extent and magnitude of the lee multiplier accurately. In this study, the wind data were initially subjected to a robust homogenisation algorithm and then, they were separated into synoptic and non-synoptic events to gain a better understanding of New Zealand’s gust climatology and sources of extreme events. It was demonstrated that synoptic events dominate the design wind speeds at most locations in New Zealand. For extreme value analysis, three different extreme value distributions were used, namely Type I (using Gumbel, Gringorten and BLUE fitting methods), Type III (using maximum likelihood and probability weighted moments methods), and Peaks-Over-Threshold (POT) approach. In addition, the predictions of NZCSM along with historical wind speeds were used to identify the lee zones, which confirms existing zones and provides evidence to support introducing new zones, and obtain estimates of the lee-multipliers. Substantial changes have been proposed for the next version of the Australian/New Zealand wind-loading standard (AS/NZS 1170.2) based on the results of this study. The changes include adding a new wind region to New Zealand, refinements of wind zone boundaries, revising all regional wind speeds and directional multipliers, and modifying the lee-zone regions and multipliers.