Windmills (Data file: wm1) Energy can be produced from wind using windmills. Choosing a site for a wind farm, the location of the windmills, can be a multimillion dollar gamble. If wind is inadequate...

Windmills (Data file: wm1) Energy can be produced from wind using windmills. Choosing a site for a wind farm, the location of the windmills, can be a multimillion dollar gamble. If wind is inadequate at the site, then the energy produced over the lifetime of the wind farm can be much less than the cost of building and operation. Prediction of long-term wind speed at a candidate site can be an important component in the decision to build or not to build. Since energy produced varies as the square of the wind speed, even small errors can have serious consequences. The data in the file wm1 provides measurements that can be used to help in the prediction process. Data were collected every 6 hours for the year 2002, except that the month of May 2002 is missing. The values Cspd are the calculated wind speeds in meters per second at a candidate site for building a wind farm. These values were collected at a tower erected on the site. The values RS pd are wind speeds at a reference site, which is a nearby location for which wind speeds have been recorded over a very long time period. Airports sometimes serve as reference sites, but in this case, the reference data comes from the National Center for Environmental Modeling (NCAR, 2013). The reference is about 50 km southwest of the candidate site. Both sites are in the northern part of South Dakota. The data were provided by Mark Ahlstrom and Rolf Miller of Wind Logics.