Wind speed modelling for structural load combination methods

Many of today's reliability-based specifications utilize somewhat outdated methods to handle the effects of load combinations. While more accurate load combination methods exist, they are seldom used due to a lack of necessary statistical data on various types of loadings. Pertinent statistics of wind were obtained from continuous gust charts. The wind at nine sites across the United States was modelled as a Poisson square wave pulse process with clustering effects being taken into consideration. Wind intensity was fitted with an Extreme Type I distribution. The data were verified by comparing extreme annual and 50-year winds obtained from the developed model with those statistics previously obtained by other researchers. Estimates of composite statistics for the contiguous United States were made. These statistics include the mean rate of occurrence, mean duration, and mean number of winds per cluster. Parameters for an Extreme Type 1 distribution of wind speed intensity and wind pressure were developed in terms of the 50-year design wind speed and the design wind pressure respectively.