Prediction of Marine Winds in the New York Bight

Abstract

Comparison is made between wind velocity measurements at two NOAA buoys, EB34 and EB41, located in the New York Bight, and winds extrapolated from nearby coastal stations and inferred from sea level pressure analysis at the National Meteorological Center. The comparison covers 0000 and 1200 GMT observations for November 1975 through March 1976. Surface winds are obtained from gradient winds by means of the analytic single-point boundary layer model proposed by Cardone (1969) and simple empirical relations. Buoy wind speeds in excess of 10 m s?1 accounted for 28% of the observations. For these strong winds, pressure-gradient based estimates provided adequate specifications of surface winds for 81% of the cases, defined by vector error <5 m s?1, and were in general superior to estimates extrapolated from single coastal stations. Rapid changes in wind speed and direction recorded in hourly buoy data indicate that resolution of winter storms requires pressure analyses on at least a 6 h cycle. The presence of moving storm systems also suggests that the use of coastal station reports can be improved by extrapolation in time as well as space.